Travellin Dave: Guitar gear won. Here's my birthday present to myself. I got this stuff way below market value. Picking it up at 10am.
That's a Synergy Syn-2 Modular preamp on top. It has two modules loaded - a Fryette Deliverance and a Friedman Dirty Shirley. These are essentially versions of hot-rodded Marshall amps.
On the bottom is a Mesa/Boogie Simul-Class 2:90. It's a hellacious amount of vacuum tube amplifier power - like, capable of sound pressure levels that would kill small children and household pets. It's nominally 90 watts per side or 180 watts bridged mono. But that's nominally. It's 1% Total Harmonic Distortion at 90 watts. But if you know anything about guitar players, we LIKE distortion. We like it a LAWT. So in a guitar rig, right about the time this thing starts to really sing it's blowing through about 200 watts per side and people 2 miles away are calling the cops. They don't make these anymore because not even rock star guitarists need that kind of power.
I need this kinda power like I need a third testicle, but the way this deal breaks down I got it for about $400, which is a third of what they cost new and half of current market value. This will be the second I've owned; way back around the turn of the century I sold the first one I owned to the CTO of Harley Davidson. I'll probably tune it to drive the home theater rig. Plenty of clean headroom for that.
Happy Birthday indeed. Now I have to go check Urban Dictionary for "Friedman Dirty Shirley"
No idea where Dave Friedman came up with the name, but the amplifier is essentially a copy of the amp Eric Clapton used to record the famous "Beano" album with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers.
Enjoy that equipment! How hard is it to keep a stock of replacement tubes for those things? I guess there are specialty manufactures for those (for top dollar), like most other things.
How long has it been since vacuum tubes were used? 40-50 years?
Well they haven't ever really stopped being used, it's just a shrinking market. The US government quit buying tubes in the 70's, but had a vast stock of them built up. The military pulled the last of its tube gear from service in the early 90's, IIRC.
There are still UHF broadcast transmitters that require tubes, and microwave ovens still use the technology. That said, the biggest demand for tubes now is in consumer and professional audio sectors - guitar amps, hi-fi amps, recording studio gear, and ham radio. But it's a slowly but steadily shrinking market. Digital Modeling and Digital Signal Processing are advanced enough and digital CPUs powerful enough that tube behavior can be simulated in the digital domain to a very high degree of authenticity. I do most of my musical work using various modelers, and you'll find modelling gear in the rigs of most of the famous guitar heroes anymore. Steve Vai, The Edge, John Petrucci, Joe Satriani, Dweezil Zappa, Alex Lifeson, Neal Schon, James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett of Metallica and the guys in Def Leppard are among the famous users of the Fractal Audio gear that I favor, but there are a host of others who use Line 6 gear and a lot of the names I mentioned use both and others.
But tubes will be around for a few more decades, at least.
