What is it about distortion pedals that makes them sound not as good as amps?

ThePrettyDamned

@icbm the jcm 900 series had some great sounds on tap, I had no idea they were hybrid till I joined this forum.

I like the blackstar stuff, but it's a bit dull. Not quite a blanket over the speaker, but it almost sounds like a recorded amp. Not sure how else to put it!

I really liked the Marshall mosfet lead 100. Really neat, vintagey kind of sounds. Actually, I probably (from memory a few years back now) preferred that to the blackstar ht, though it's a bit apples and oranges.

steamabacus

ThePrettyDamned said:

@icbm the jcm 900 series had some great sounds on tap, I had no idea they were hybrid till I joined this forum.

Neither did I. I remember reading a review that seemed to suggest they had an inbuilt boost circuit (which is why the gain goes to 20, 11 - 20 indicating the extra boost) but that it was driving the pre-amp valves.

The funny thing is, I have a mate with a JCM900 Dual Reverb 100W 2x12 combo. He absolutely refuses to use distortion pedals, only using his amp because "you can't play complex chords with distortion boxes, only valves keep the note separation, intermodulation distortion, blah, blah, blah".

I haven't had the heart to tell him what's really going on inside his amp.

Drew_TNBD

I'd rather use a JCM900 than the JVM. Tone-wise... I preferred the JCM900. Feature set was never quite there though!

ThePrettyDamned

Drew_fx;272882" said:

I'd rather use a JCM900 than the JVM. Tone-wise... I preferred the JCM900. Feature set was never quite there though!

Never tried a jvm, but I think it's a lot more than I'd ever need.

Oddly, the JCM900 sl-x was often touted as being the nu metal amp, but it had some pretty sweet sounds on it that had nothing to do with nu metal. Sounded different to the other JCM900 amps though.

Nearly bought one, should have done - it put a big grin on my face in store, but they kept asking me to 'downtune that shit, man'.

monquixote

Totally agree on the jcm900. The studio I used to rehearse at had 800 900 and 2000 and I always much preferred the 900. I don't care if it's hybrid it sounds beefy.

Cleans are a bit poo though.

ICBM

steamabacus said:

I remember reading a review that seemed to suggest they had an inbuilt boost circuit (which is why the gain goes to 20, 11 - 20 indicating the extra boost) but that it was driving the pre-amp valves.

No, it's pretty much a pure IC gain/diode clipping distortion arrangement, not just a boost. In fact, the 'clean channel' is quite like a Tube Screamer and the 'lead channel' is quite like a DS-1 - not in detail, but that's the basic topology.

The valves are used for the tone stack and a couple of (clean) intermediate gain stages before and after the reverb, and the phase inverter.

ThePrettyDamned said:

Oddly, the JCM900 sl-x was often touted as being the nu metal amp, but it had some pretty sweet sounds on it that had nothing to do with nu metal. Sounded different to the other JCM900 amps.

The SL-X is actually a bit different - it's a derivative of the High Gain MV model, which uses valve gain with solid-state diode clipping, but replaces the diodes with another valve stage, so it is *close* to all-valve... but not quite, because the FX loop and MV control stages are still IC, although they don't contribute to the distortion.

thisisguitar

monquixote said:

I think amps are best at sounding like amps so if that's your benchmark a pedal can only fail.

The dumb thing that a lot of pedal manufacturers do is make stupid claims about pedals sounding like very specific amps (I'm looking at you Catalinbread) when they sound like distortion boxes. If you are spending £200 on a distortion box you probably already have a decent valve amp so don't tell me that this switch goes between a 1968 plexi with a valve rectifier and a 1987 JCM800 with a modified tone stack just tell me it switches between silicon and LED clipping because I've owned enough distortion pedals to know what that means.

I've never really found any amps where I've ever bonded with the drive channel like I have with a Shredmaster, Riot, or Bogner Red. It may be because I haven't tried the right pedals, but even when I was playing through Photek's JVM we ended up using a Box of Rock even though there were four channels of gain to play with. 

I tried a Victory 50 amp, and put my Bogner Red through it… the Victory was miles better! Sold the Bogner shortly after that.

ThePrettyDamned

ICBM;272967" said:

[quote=steamabacus]
I remember reading a review that seemed to suggest they had an inbuilt boost circuit (which is why the gain goes to 20, 11 - 20 indicating the extra boost) but that it was driving the pre-amp valves.

No, it's pretty much a pure IC gain/diode clipping distortion arrangement, not just a boost. In fact, the 'clean channel' is quite like a Tube Screamer and the 'lead channel' is quite like a DS-1 - not in detail, but that's the basic topology.

The valves are used for the tone stack and a couple of (clean) intermediate gain stages before and after the reverb, and the phase inverter.

ThePrettyDamned said:

Oddly, the JCM900 sl-x was often touted as being the nu metal amp, but it had some pretty sweet sounds on it that had nothing to do with nu metal. Sounded different to the other JCM900 amps.

The SL-X is actually a bit different - it's a derivative of the High Gain MV model, which uses valve gain with solid-state diode clipping, but replaces the diodes with another valve stage, so it is *close* to all-valve... but not quite, because the FX loop and MV control stages are still IC, although they don't contribute to the distortion.[/quote]

Okay, cool! I wouldn't say I preferred the sound of it to a boggo JCM900 but it was a good sounding amp.

What an odd range though.

ICBM

ThePrettyDamned said:

What an odd range though.

I think it made sense at the time. Back then, almost no-one actually cared about "all valve" "diode clipping" or any of the other hang-ups we seem to have now. It was a convenient way of building amps with more gain, more functionality and less valves - hence lower cost, and theoretically less warranty problems, even though in the end some of the other changes made the amps *less* reliable. In fact, both the original models - High Gain MV and Dual Reverb - are rather clever designs which achieve that with only two preamp valves (strictly speaking, the third is the phase inverter) while putting the valve stages where they make the most difference. It was some time before anyone even noticed that they weren't "all valve", if I remember rightly - and some people still don't realise!

Eventually some people started to notice, and "diode clipping" - which had been used as early as 1982 on the JCM800 Split Channel models, and then the Jubilees (which are still highly regarded!), although these both use "all valve gain" and so are a slightly different type of hybrid, confused yet? - became a dirty word. The SL-X was the response to that, although it is still not quite all-valve.

steamabacus

ICBM said:

steamabacus said:

I remember reading a review that seemed to suggest they had an inbuilt boost circuit (which is why the gain goes to 20, 11 - 20 indicating the extra boost) but that it was driving the pre-amp valves.

No, it's pretty much a pure IC gain/diode clipping distortion arrangement, not just a boost. In fact, the 'clean channel' is quite like a Tube Screamer and the 'lead channel' is quite like a DS-1 - not in detail, but that's the basic topology.

The valves are used for the tone stack and a couple of (clean) intermediate gain stages before and after the reverb, and the phase inverter.

It makes me wonder if the reviewer was genuinely confused or if manufacturers were being willfully misleading about their circuits even back then.

ICBM

steamabacus said:

It makes me wonder if the reviewer was genuinely confused or if manufacturers were being willfully misleading about their circuits even back then.

Probably genuinely confused. As far as I know, Marshall have never said anything - at least not publicly - about the detail of the JCM900 design, although they have always called them "valve" amps - which they are. Just not *all* valve.

But some manufacturers definitely were willfully misleading even then - Mesa for example. I remember quite clearly some ad blurb about their amps (Mark series at the time) being "all tube", whereas in fact the Graphic EQ is solid-state, and is a critical part of the tone of the whole amp - so much so that in a couple of their later models they used a secret encapsulated circuit called the "Mojo Module", which is in fact a GEQ turned off! The signal passes through four transistors at all times.

Who would have thought that? Transistors make a valve amp sound better! They don't distort in this case, though - the circuit has an internal trimmer just before it to make precisely sure it can't.

ThePrettyDamned

Hahaha 'mojo module'.

Drew_TNBD

Bit of a stink kicked up recently with the Axe FX firmware, because they changed the way the diode clipping (saturation button) worked on the amp models. A lot of people were annoyed by a volume drop change they introduced, so next FW will fix it. But it got me thinking... I nearly always use the Saturation button when I'm doing high-gain sounds. Just sounds tighter and less flubby than leaving it off and cranking the gain.

Also... I HAAATTTEEEEE the sound of a cranked 65 Bassman - in Axe FX world anyway....

ICBM

Drew_fx said:

I nearly always use the Saturation button when I'm doing high-gain sounds. Just sounds tighter and less flubby than leaving it off and cranking the gain.

Using modelled diode clipping in a modelled valve amp? Heretic! You need to stick to modelled valves, that's the only true way.

Drew_fx said:

Also... I HAAATTTEEEEE the sound of a cranked 65 Bassman - in Axe FX world anyway....

I had real '64 and '65 Bassmans once. Incredible things. The best single tone I've ever got at gig volume was the '64 into a Marshall 4x12", cranked up to 7, with a Boss SE-70 in front for extra dirt and FX. And a Telecaster .

Yet more gear I should never have sold...

Drew_TNBD

)

Dave_Mc

I dunno about the noise thing. I'm not sure it's the noise, for me. The sustain doesn't seem right to me on non-tube amps (I've heard people say who know more than me that that's inherent to diode clipping, because once the signal drops below a certain point the clipping stops? Something like that, anyway). Plus you can boost them normally much better than solid state amps.

You can definitely overstate the differences (all that guff like "only tubes react to your playing"... they react better, IMO, but it's not like solid state doesn't at all), and I don't think tubes are magic either, but at the same time I hear (and maybe more importantly, feel) definitely differences between tube amps and ss amps (or pedals).

ICBM said:

For what it's worth, I never liked the Blackstar HT sound, and finding out they were hybrids has no bearing on that - in fact I much prefer the Marshall Valvestate 80xx and VS series, which are also hybrids but really an all-solid-state amp with only a token valve in the preamp, and use diode (LED) clipping for all the overdrive - whereas the HTs are more of a true hybrid with valves in both the pre and power amp, and where the solid-state does not actually contribute to the overdrive until the gain is almost all the way up. So I don't think that the reason I find them rather 'flat' sounding as well has anything to do with the solid state. (But also for what it's worth, I prefer the HTs to the Valvestate AVT series, which I find gutless and thin-sounding.)

A different type of true hybrid is the Marshall JCM900 Dual Reverb model, which has an all-valve power amp but a complex hybrid preamp where most of the distortion comes from what are rather like a couple of pedal circuits in the front end! To me these sound a lot better than the HTs as well. So does what generates the distortion actually matter? Or is it some other characteristic of the circuit?

I do get annoyed by the marketing BS, I have to say - I was one of those who pointed out that the HT series weren't all-valve… not because I have anything against that but because Blackstar initially tried to mislead people that they were, and still haven't ever explicitly admitted that they aren't. My favourite high-gain sounds actually come from hybrid setups anyway! (Usually a pedal into a medium-gain amp.)

Any chance you could explain why the distortion is mainly tube-generated in the BS HT series? I've seen the schematic and I've seen the clipping diodes (which one of the BS engineers, when emailed by someone on another forum, tried to claim weren't clipping diodes), but I don't want to be posting incorrect information, either. Doesn't it also have a bunch of op-amp gain stages before the preamp tube, too? I suppose they could be working like a clean boost, though.

I still don't like it, either. Like you, the problem isn't that it's hybrid, the problem is that they're very coy about the fact it's hybrid. I know when it was first released I was actually quite interested because I assumed it was all-tube. )

People say (much like in those jan ray etc. threads in TGP) "Oh, move on, everyone knows now." I disagree. Not so much here (since you're fighting the good fight pretty effectively ) ), but I know on UG (where we similarly try to point out they're hybrid, but it has much more members than here, or at least much more casual members) any time there's a thread about Blackstars it's clear that some people think they're all-tube. And even argue they're all-tube for a while until we put them right.

ICBM said:

I think it made sense at the time. Back then, almost no-one actually cared about "all valve" "diode clipping" or any of the other hang-ups we seem to have now. It was a convenient way of building amps with more gain, more functionality and less valves - hence lower cost, and theoretically less warranty problems, even though in the end some of the other changes made the amps *less* reliable. In fact, both the original models - High Gain MV and Dual Reverb - are rather clever designs which achieve that with only two preamp valves (strictly speaking, the third is the phase inverter) while putting the valve stages where they make the most difference. It was some time before anyone even noticed that they weren't "all valve", if I remember rightly - and some people still don't realise!

Eventually some people started to notice, and "diode clipping" - which had been used as early as 1982 on the JCM800 Split Channel models, and then the Jubilees (which are still highly regarded!), although these both use "all valve gain" and so are a slightly different type of hybrid, confused yet? - became a dirty word. The SL-X was the response to that, although it is still not quite all-valve.

I know a guy on UG says a lot of people he knew at the time (including him) were pissed when they realised the 900s were hybrid. Obviously that's second-hand information on my part, but yeah.

Drew_TNBD

Regarding the noise thing... I don't think it's really part of it. Axe FX to me sounds just as good and realistic as an amp does, even when I use the noise-gates. Also, noise-gate with a real amp doesn't make the amp have any less punch.

I suspect - in my completely uneducated non-physics trained way - that it's to do with the interactions going on between the input of the amp, the power section sag+bloom stuff, and the interaction with the speaker. I don't think you get a lot of that stuff with a pedal, so you lose thunk, chunk, and whatever other bullshit adjectives you wanna throw at it.

To me, there is a very drastic qualitative difference between clean amp+ pedal, and just a dirty amp. People have gotten around this by saying that pedals are their own thing and that it isn't a fair comparison. I guess that is true in one sense.

ICBM

Dave_Mc said:

Any chance you could explain why the distortion is mainly tube-generated in the BS HT series? I've seen the schematic and I've seen the clipping diodes (which one of the BS engineers, when emailed by someone on another forum, tried to claim weren't clipping diodes), but I don't want to be posting incorrect information, either. Doesn't it also have a bunch of op-amp gain stages before the preamp tube, too? I suppose they could be working like a clean boost, though.

The schematic that's available on the net is correct as far as I can tell, and it does contain that Tube Screamer-like circuit with diodes in an IC feedback loop, but don't jump to conclusions! It doesn't quite tell the whole story of how it works… you're closer than you may think .

There are indeed "clipping diodes" - although technically they are not clipping, they are hard-limiting the gain in a feedback loop. I think this is splitting hairs, to be honest - while it's not an absolutely correct description, they do still clip a part of the signal at that point, even if the result is not actually to clip the overall waveform itself.

But the diodes don't begin to conduct and clip the signal until the gain pot is above about 3 o'clock, with a typical loud humbucker going into it. The valve stages which follow it actually have a lot of gain, and overdrive a long way before this, so the with the gain knob below 3 o'clock the distortion you hear is all from the valve. Even when the diodes do eventually begin to conduct, the distortion they produce is entirely masked by that of the valve - if you scope it, the waveform doesn't change shape, it just becomes slightly more squashed. Having experimented with removing the diodes, their purpose is actually to prevent blocking distortion in the valve by limiting the signal going into it, rather than to add more dirt.

So it's neither correct to describe it as "all valve", or "just a Tube Screamer circuit with a valve after it", It's somewhere between the two - more like a valve amp being pushed harder by a Tube Screamer set close to a clean boost.

ThePrettyDamned

I've never understood people who get pissed off when an amp they've loved, raved about and gigged is revealed to not be all valve. Surely the fact they love it is more important?

Obviously, advertising is misleading, but imagine how much less punchy an advert would be if it said, 'near enough all valve. We've used some solid state components which are not truly used for clipping in the traditional sense, but are important to the circuit', or 'some clipping comes from solid state components, but it still sounds awesome'.

No one would buy them, because everyone knows 100 percent all valve sounds better.

Especially when pushed by a fet clipping circuit

Edit: obviously, they shouldn't claim it's all valve, but I think the term 'hybrid', while accurate, diminishes the importance of the valve circuitry in these amps.

ICBM

I just think the whole idea of rating something as "all valve" is the problem - it deliberately implies superiority.

I don't think the term "hybrid" diminishes the importance of the valve elements - if they weren't important, you could just make it all solid-state!

There is also a big sliding scale of "hybrid", even just from the examples already given - everything from an essentially solid-state amp with a single valve in the preamp which really only adds some sort of "valveness" to the sound, but doesn't even distort, all the way through to a valve amp which has a couple of solid-state stages for things like the FX loop (if they aren't bypassable) which are still technically hybrids. Are they all equally good, or bad?

And are amps which use all-valve gain but with solid-state diode clipping also hybrids? I think you could argue it both ways…

There is even an amp which is the other way round - all-solid-state with a valve used purely as a clipping device! Bonus point if you know what it is .