Vacuum tubes are an expensive, inefficient, and unreliable relic of early 1900s technology. So why are guitarists (and me) still lugging around old tube amps 80 years after the transistor made them obsolete? The short answer is that tube amps sound good when you overload their input signal, and transistor amps don’t1. So, I can’t just swap my tubes for transistors one-to-one and get the same tone in an amp. But could I replace my tubes with a few billion transistors in a GPU running an op...
