Korg is cutting into our turf

[willienillie]

I've heard a fair number of tube drive pedals, and I have to say that's probably the most bland sounding one I've heard

Maybe your dreadlocks aren't purple enough.

But more seriously, that's not a sound that requires any kind of "tube" to achieve.  NuTube is a gimmick.  Gotta have something to show off at NAMM.

[Rob Strand]

I do that with my tube pedals too. It doesn't sound as good as it would with a cabsim, but it doesn't sound awful.

All directly recorded stuff sounds bad to me 

There's some good examples here, IIRC at one point he does a directly recorded Marshall amp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vRXQxdPmEM

(I don't agree with him saying a directly recorded signal is the "transparent" tone;  that a very biased example.)
 

[Mark Hammer]

I've heard a fair number of tube drive pedals, and I have to say that's probably the most bland sounding one I've heard

Maybe your dreadlocks aren't purple enough.

But more seriously, that's not a sound that requires any kind of "tube" to achieve.  NuTube is a gimmick.  Gotta have something to show off at NAMM.

I don't know that NuTube is necessary technology, but it is no more a gimmick than germanium transistors are.  Whether or not tube-based drive pedals do anything more to a boosted signal than your plain vanilla op-amp, people seem to want tube-based drive pedals.  But tubes produce heat, take up space, can be shattered, and work better on higher voltages that can be difficult or inconvenient to provide.  For those who feel they need tubes, NuTube provides a solution and convenience.

[amptramp]

If you want to solve the problem of tubes being shattered, use metal octal tubes or nuvistor triodes.  Some of them work at reasonably low voltages.  Some of the metal tubes have grid caps for that depression-era mojo (but you might have to find a way to lock the cap in position).  You can get triodes, pentodes and pentagrid converters, some with remote cutoff so you can make a tremolo easily.  Some triodes are provided with a pair of diodes using a common cathode with the triodes.  You can get 6.3 and 12.6 volt heaters for most of them.

You can buy packaged power converters that take rectified heater voltage and produce high voltage for the tubes if you want to run them at normal values.  That is, unless you want to go old school and use a vibrator supply or a dynamotor.

It is a lot easier to design with tubes that you can characterize as FET's with a tightly controlled Vp and Idss.  The biggest advantage of tubes is their harmonic generation can be made to be very musical.

[PRR]

Happy 4,000!

> The biggest advantage of tubes is their harmonic generation can be made to be very musical.

WHEN worked in their happy-zone.

Because vacuum is a terrible conductor, this gets increasingly hard as voltage is reduced. At the 12V level often used, the NuTube needs all the help it can get from multiple opamps just to pass a signal, nevermind be happy. It's a gimmick. As you say, there are real tubes for almost any need, and can be worked at real voltages.

[Ben N]

My Vox MV50-AC sounds good as you turn it up, surprisingly good for what is essentially a Class D amplifier, even if it doesn't threaten to quench my lust for a Real McCoy AC-15.  Is this because of the Nutube? Maybe. And maybe one of us here could do just as well using one of the standard distortion topologies that we all know and love (including DIY commercial Vox simulators in pedal format from e.g. ROG and Bajaman, not to mention commercial products) tuned to cover an amp-like range and mate up with a 50 watt mono class D amp, and the choice of the Nutube preamp, while functionally valid, is driven more my marketing and surplus production capacity than by sonics. OK, whatever; I'll probably never know. I'll probably also never spend money on a Nutube for DIYing, for the reasons discussed here.