Transistor Amplifiers(or Solid State Amplifiers) While tube amplifiers are the preferred type of amplifiers for most musicians, their price, weight and maintenance needed usually deters many of us. The solid state or transistor amplifier are often very light (as low as 4lbs) and inexpensive. There are some significant benefits to solid state amplifiers too. 1) They turn on immediately, 2) They are usually very dependable, 3) They will not fail if there is no speaker load on the outputs. 4) Most can handle speaker impedance loads down to 2 and 4 ohms, 5) Solid state amplifiers can develop very high power (i.e. 1KW and more). Below is nice solid state amplifier of mine, the Peavey Delta Bass head amplifier.
This amplifier provides 160 watts of power at a 4 ohm load. The front end circuitry of this amp is similar to the Session and Nitro amp heads, which is an all transistor pre-amp section. For a solid state amplifier, this amp has a very good sound. Below is a Carvin DCM-1000 stereo power amplifier. This is a 100% transistor (solid state) amplifier.
The nice thing about solid state amps is that they are very flat over the frequency spectrum, and they do not color the sound, like tubes do. So if you have a nice sounding tube amplifier, but it only puts out 50 watts, you can connect it to a big solid state amplifier like the one above, you have a real work horse of an amplifier. Check the Resources page for locations to purchase solid state amplifiers.
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