"I am Tosk" wrote in message
...


Not to mention. There are plenty of old tube Amps available and the
parts are available too...

Scotty


Usually all the old tube amps need are new capacitors. Tubes, like you say
are plentiful.
Transformers fail rarely and are still available when they do fail.

I recently came across a Paul Reed Smith solid state amp that was designed
back in the late
80's. Smith retained a guy to design it, anticipating a future shortage of
tubes. The amp
was designed with a "harmonic generator" to emulate the sound of a tube amp.

Only about 300 were built. Turns out the anticipated tube shortage never
happened.

Reason?

During the Cold War, while the USA developed hardened solid state
instruments and avionic displays, the Soviet Union stuck mostly with vacuum
tube devices due to their natural immunity to radiation and EMI blasts.

When the Soviet Union collapsed they had a well developed manufacturing
capacity to build vacuum tubes. They took advantage of it and are now the
leading producers of replacement tubes for virtually all applications.

Eisboch (with more useless trivia)