Quote:
Originally Posted by Paleolith54
Hopefully someone more technically knowledgeable will chime in with a better explanation, but the BASIC idea is that an attenuator takes the full power of your amp (whatever that is) and attenuates (hence the name) the resulting volume by "absorbing" the power being sent to the speaker (this is why it's sometimes referred to as a "power soak"). Think of it this way: your pre-amp and power-amp are operating near capacity, and the attenuator enables you to get the natural tube compression and feel that Bob was referring to at a volume that won't shake your brain out of your skull. The attenuator controls volume, not wattage at any of your gain stages.
Low-wattage settings on the amps with which I am familiar give somewhat similar results by actually lowering the headroom of the power tube section (or of how those tubes are used within the circuit) to make them easier to overdrive, so you get similar results. In the end, all you care about (or all I care about, at least) is how it sounds. I'm saying you can get there either way, but they are not the same thing.
It's not really as complicated as I may be making it sound, sorry. It's all about clipping. If you're playing through a high-wattage amp and want to drive the tubes into clipping and retain your hearing, you put an attenuator in line between power amp and speaker to reduce volume. If you're playing through a low-wattage amp (say the .1W setting on that 5W Bugera referred to earlier) you can get that same level of clipping and still retain your hearing. If you're playing through anything in the 5W or greater range, IMO, you want to just keep the volume down and use an OD pedal to help slam the tubes without adding any appreciable volume.
Honestly, I don't know the effect of triode versus pentode on wattage, just that they give you a different amount of "sag", so feel different when you play them. I suspect any effect on wattage is pretty minimal. I had a Mesa Mark V once, and that's what I noticed in the different triode/pentode settings. They felt different, but I never noticed any appreciable volume difference.
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I may be confusing/conflating "power" attentuation (watts in) and "volume" attentuation (watts scrubbed off after 100% power production)? Or I could be completely fabricating a distinction that doesn't exist, I don't know.
That Bugera triode/pentode thing seems to be discussed in the same context others use to discuss wattage reductions.