That NOS Tube Difference!

They use OEM branded tubes made in Russia and China, like Mesa. So does pretty much everyone else, because that's what's readily available.

However, lots of folks who buy these amps immediately replace the tubes with NOS. NOS tube dealers often have packages for McIntosh amps.
Yup, tubestore.com
 
How much effect did old recording equipment have on tone? I know there is so much emphasis on guitars and amps.

Tons, just like new equipment and plugins can radically alter tone. Any EQ, compression, and other processing changes tone, whether new or old gear. You can do it gently or radically, now as then. But not so much because the gear was vintage, it was because of how people used it.

Filter the bottom end out of a guitar signal to make room for bass and kick, boost the treble for some sparkle, and scoop the mids to stay out of the way of the vocal, then compress the crap out of it, and even a modern guitar recording isn't going to sound like the guitar in the room. They had that stuff back then, and used it, too.

I've got experience with 50s and 60s gear at various studios, and here's the thing; good vintage gear was high fidelity stuff, it simply didn't have quite the headroom and frequency response of new gear, and being tube powered, it sounded different from modern gear if overdriven. But it wasn't lo-fi like a cheap cassette deck. Engineers were after quality sound then.

All you have to do is listen to well-recorded jazz and classical recordings from the late fifties and sixties to know how good recordings could be back then. Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is a good example of a recording that wasn't manipulated much. It still sounds real after 58 years, so it's not like they couldn't do real back in the day!

Check out Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philarmonic's 1961-62 recordings of the Beethoven symphonies -- the recording quality is still gorgeous and high fidelity, even by our modern standards; as you'd expect since they were cut on Studer tape machines, using Neumann mics that we still use today (my son dug the set I got in 1971 so much that he took it to LA when he moved there after college).

But rock and roll was loud, and wacky, and always was recorded and produced differently.

It's true that tape saturation somewhat darkens and artificially fattens tone, depending on how hot the levels hitting tape are, but tape is still around in plenty of studios, and how it's manipulated depends on the production.

Then again, listen to Cream's Disraeli Gears (recorded around 1966-7 in New York) on a good set of monitors. You can hear the mic preamps breaking up (I can tell it's the mic pres because of the crackling in a way amps don't do, and preamps do). So not all of the distortion in the tracks is amp distortion. I'm guessing that was deliberate, but who knows what the intent was? I'm sure they heard it at the time and left it in because Clapton liked it.

Another example would be the tricks the Beatles used on Revolver that were so random in some ways that they'd be difficult to reproduce digitally. The first tape loops and backwards recording -- the loops were done with tape spooling off tape machines running around pencils and mic stands as tape guides held by studio engineers -- how does that get exactly duplicated now? You can imagine how many variations were happening as tape rolled with a hand held pencil as a tape guide! No way it could be held perfectly still.

Then you get to stuff like recording the instruments at one tape speed and overdubbing vocals at a different speed, as in Blue Jay Way, so the instruments sound otherworldly, etc. Yes, speeds can be manipulated digitally, but doing it with tape had a different sound. For years I tried to figure that sound out, until I read about it and realized you need a tape based studio to do it!

Motown used Altec and other EQs modded from theater stuff; they overdrove the mic pres to fatten up the sound, too. But that can all be done now with other processors.

Big plate reverbs sound different from emulations of plate reverbs (I've used them often).

So yeah, I'd say the old gear affected the sound and tone to a degree, but more than that, the intent of the engineers, producers and artists to manipulate sound was a bigger factor.

It's true that before 4-track recording and 8-track, there were bounces for overdubs between mono tracks and at times two machines, and the highs got goosed to overcome the accumulated tape hiss, but the equipment was still pretty darn good, and I think a certain amount of myth has grown around vintage recording gear. By the late 50s, it was pretty good!
 
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A billion.

However, the biggest one is still the player.

Back when I owned and ran a studio, I would use the same equipment day in and day out on different players, and it was shocking how easy it was to get tones one day and how difficult the next.

Yes. The guy I played with in my last band and I used to geek out on different gear on a regular basis. We'd mix 'n' match each others' amps and guitars and speakers to see what the differences were (by the way, speakers and cabs and proximity to walls and floors will make or break an amp). The biggest lesson I took away from farting around with all that stuff is that the player makes the biggest difference.

We'd hand the same guitar back and forth, and his fingers and style always sounded brighter and more stinging than mine. Always.
 
We'd hand the same guitar back and forth, and his fingers and style always sounded brighter and more stinging than mine. Always.

Of course, but the operative question isn't whether two players sound different, because of course they do; it's whether you, the player, get different tones when you play with different gear.

The gear search is all about you. It's only about you. It's one of those few subjects where it's OK to be all about you. ;)
 
Of course, but the operative question isn't whether two players sound different, because of course they do; it's whether you, the player, get different tones when you play with different gear.

The gear search is all about you. It's only about you. It's one of those few subjects where it's OK to be all about you. ;)

Well, I sound like me, no matter what I do! :confused::D
 
Well, I sound like me, no matter what I do! :confused::D

Me, too, but I sound like me playing a Plexi when I use the HXDA, and like me playing a Tweed using the DG30. And those two me's are different sounding me's (I'm sure I used the apostrophe incorrectly there, but there's no plural for the word "me" anyway).

I sound like me on the McCarty Singlecut, but like a different me on the McSoap.

I'm me playing without a wah, and me playing with one, and each me then has a different sound. Etc. The gear does matter, if you take my meaning.
 
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