Is it just me......?

[rwinking]

So I have four real vintage (two of them were severely reliced by me) guitars from 1958 to 71. I have one vintage amp left. So is it just me or do these old guitars just sound better through a really old amp than they do through a copy of a really old amp? Don't get me wrong....I love my Heritage guitars and other guitars from the late 70s and into the 80s. They all sound damn good through an old amp. However, when old amps meet old guitars, there is something magical that happens. My friend has a 50s deluxe and a super. I get the same experience. Perhaps it is confimation bias or something like that. But damn! This is how the guitar and amp combo is meant to sound I believe. It could be that as a kid that is what I heard. And when the amp heats up, there is a certain smell it has that also goes with the sound. I once had a 1996 Prosonic that heated up and had a certain tube-y/tolex smell and sounded really old when it was in the non-gain mode.Somehow my newer amps just miss that certain something. I will not take an old amp on the road for obvious reasons but at least I can get the experience in my studio.

This makes me wish I had an old Marshall or Vox....

[Kuz]

I no longer have any vintage guitars but I do have 4 vintage amps (Brown Face Deluxe, Brown Face Vibrolux, Black Face Vibrolux Reverb, and a Black Face Deluxe Reverb).   

I can't acknowledge that a vintage guitar sounds better through a vintage amp.  But I can confirm, that ANY guitar I own sounds better through my vintage amps verse new amps.  There is a more 3D quality to the vintage amps.  They sound like the sound is coming from 180 degree and don't sound boxy like a lot of newer amps I have played/owned over the years.

[bolero]

I wonder if it's got anything to do with the metallurgy of the transformers: old vs new

[rockabilly69]

I love old amps, I own some really nice vintage amps, and I have access to many great old ones. But I don't think they sound any better than a well built modern amp. I have a TopHat Club Deluxe that pretty much can hang with any amp that I've ever played. I'm in the middle of an extended recording project with my band, and we've recorded about 20 songs and not once did I turn on a vintage amp. It's mostly my TopHat, because to me, the TopHat sounds as a good as an amp can sound. The combination of my Telecaster (a partscaster that I built) and that TopHat is the sound that I've always chased, but could never get... till now that is.

And my handbuilt (handwired) Marshall style amp that my buddy Ryan built beats the pants of off of any vintage Marshall I've played. It's the only other amp I've used besides my TopHat on the project. I've owned a few vintage Marshalls, but I got rid of them all. I will never sell the one I have now. Most everytime I plug into it I come up with something musical. 

Also my buddy owns two perfectly maintained tweed 5E3 Deluxes and another pre 5E3 Deluxe and they all sound great and a bit different, yet my Clark Beauford amp to me sounds as good as any of these tweeds, I think we are in a amp renaissance with many builders building some of the best amps ever made.

I think there are amp builders out there now that have cracked the code of the originals, but you'll pay through the nose for some of the best ones:) 

Now I'm not saying there aren't any great vintage amps out there, because I've heard and played through a bunch of great ones. Recently I heard an early 60'd VOX AC10 that was just magic and had a sound I've never heard in a modern amp, but I don't know many of the modern Vox style builders.