This seems like it's aimed at people who have never used a tube amp before. It's good that they have collected here both amp manufacturers and digital gear makers, interestingly both have quite similar opinions about it.
I skimmed through some of the opinions and there's a lot of things like:
- "The modeler doesn't sound like what the amp really sounded in the room when it was recorded"
- Well, connect it to a poweramp and guitar cab and it does!
- "The modeler is missing dynamics vs a cranked tube amp"
- If you are cranking the tube amp without attenuators, most are at so ungodly levels that you'd be hard pressed to notice anything but it sounding painful, unless you are in a large auditorium and up sized space.
- If you are using an attenuator, you are already making a compromise compared to the guitar cab being connected directly.
- If you are talking about things like feedback, then sure. But then you could just run it loud through a monitor speaker or a poweramp and guitar cab as it's more of an acoustic phenomenon than anything to do with what produces the sound.
- "It's what helped create all those fantastic guitar tones on your favorite records!"
- As if that isn't plenty of studio magic in play, from mics to mic pres, EQ, effects on top, layering tracks...
- This statement is pure nostalgia.
To me the important experience about playing a loud amp (doesn't have to be tube!) is that there's a power to it that you miss at low volume. It punches in a different way, it feels more like an unruly beast. Taming that beast is something a guitarist should learn to do by learning how to play with dynamics, how to manage feedback, how to get it to sound great at that volume or how to make it work with a band.
I totally get how fun playing amps through real cabs in a room at a loud volume is. That's what rock n' roll is all about! You also can't go wrong with the simplicity of tube amps. Plug it into a cab that pairs well with the amp, turn it up to reasonably loud, do minimal EQ adjustments and it's going to sound great without worrying about virtual mic positions or impedance curves etc.
I sometimes look through tube heads available on my local market and get tempted because there's some really good gear for not that much money. Someone was selling a Marshall JVM410 for about 700 € some time ago, that was a good deal. But then I started thinking about the practicality of it. The head alone weighs almost as much as my entire BluGuitar Amp 1 + two 1x12 cabs rig. There's only a 3.7 kg / 8.16 lbs difference. The one thing I don't miss about real amps is hauling them around, even if I don't do much of that these days. On top of that, I sold my tube amps a few years back because I know I wouldn't get to play them loud enough regularly.
"Maybe I should own one, so I actually know if my modelers or BluGuitar sound as good" assurance. But I've already done those tests against a Bogner and Victory head into several different guitar cabs. The BluGuitar and Fractal both passed with flying colors. It wasn't a case of "this sounds/feels worse" but a case of "this sounds marginally different", like any two tube amps with a similar circuit would, but I could dial both the Fractal amp models (of amps it doesn't even directly model!) and the BluGuitar to sound so similar that it didn't really matter to me.
@GuitarJon if you want an idea for a followup video: Ask these same people why everyone should own a digital modeler. Because I feel even the most devoted tube amp fans would benefit from owning one. Whether it's to explore sounds they don't have in their tube amps, have a practical silent practise or recording rig etc.
