Cleanest of the Clean

[Brad Sarno]

I think it's interesting this quest for clean. Truly clean is seldom the best sounding. The Evans and Webbs use JFETs because of their sweet sounding and musical harmonic distortion characteristics, however subtle they may be. Recording engineers use microphones and preamps that offer musical, harmonic distortion characteristics that enhance music and sound nice to the ear. Right amounts of good distortion is where we get "warmth" and "sweetness" and "punch" and "sustain" and all the other musical adjectives we like to describe pleasing tone.

Purely clean, accurate, and ultra-low distortion is not typically what people's ears find is sonically best. Sometimes what people call "clean" is actually rich with subtle distortion overtones that have presence or sparkle or other factors that please the ear and add presence and life to the source, but aren't truly "clean". Truly clean will typically sound sterile and cold and un-inviting.

Guitar speakers are far from clean and they introduce all kinds of distortion. If you really look at the tone gods of the world whether they be steel players, guitar players, bass players, recording engineers, etc. they will almost always be creating this great tone by the use of carefully selected equipment that creates just the right amount of musical distortion to enhance the sound quality. Clean is boring sounding, IMHO. If clean was best, we'd all be going direct with high-fidelity transistor preamplifiers and we'd record music with flat-response instrumentation/measurment mic's. Neither is the case in the real world.


Brad Sarno

[Gene Jones]

*<font size="1" color="#8e236b"><p align="center">[This message was edited by Gene Jones on 13 November 2005 at 12:30 PM.]</p></FONT>

[Dan Tyack]

That was Lloyd Green through a Fender amplifier, which has somewhere around 3-5% distortion on a good day.

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