I've always been fascinated by hybrids of the 60's and 70's, and really I'm curious would there be a market for those sort of hybrids if they were made today? Suppose something like PNP Germaniums feeding into a tube driver and power section? Place it all on 60's style (but not construction quality!) PCB's, make them exposed, polished metal chassis with some wood trim? I would really like to build and sell them, but I'm just not sure if anyone would be willing to buy. Thoughts?
What do people think of modern hybrids?
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Welcome to AK. I'm not entirely teasing when I offer this opinion (which is only that): I think whether there is a market depends on how good you are at marketing certain kinds of noise and distortion as euphonious.
Do you have a line on a supply of Ge transistors? You might be competing with people who build or repair guitar amps and stomp boxes.
Do you have a line on a supply of Ge transistors? You might be competing with people who build or repair guitar amps and stomp boxes.
Exactly this.
It’s not as hot a topic as speaker cables or what brand of oil you use, but it is objectively true that the biggest difference between tubes and modern solid-state is the amount and type of distortion created by these older technologies. Some buyers find this distortion to be romantic, warm, otherwise pleasant over simply amplifying the pure inputs and these are subjective, unless you’re Bob Carver* you would need to experiment to see what combination creates the most pleasant distortion for a particular listener.
If you were to design and build a device that perfectly emulates different types of distortion and can vary them to taste, essentially a processor with multiple variable parameters that a listener could tailor to his/her specific listening preferences, it might or might not sell as people feel that solid-state cannot perfectly produce tube sounds. To be commercially successful you’d likely need to mount and light some dummy tubes that the buyer can “roll” to make him happy, it’s a religion. It certainly can be done electronically however (and gasp, digitally).
* The Bob Carver Challenge and the TFM series of amplifiers that followed began with a challenge put forth by a couple of audio magazines for Bob to create a solid-state amplifiers that none of their “golden ears” editors could tell in a double-blind test was not their reference Conrad-Johnson tube amplifier. Bob won, twice.