I love tubes for amps. I have so bought so many non-functioning tube amps over the past 5 years. Most just had a bad capacitor, bad transformer (which I would usually replace with several transformers for the different voltages), or were just junk in the basement. I have an old Bogen challenger 60W PA amp I use for my bass. It uses 807's as the output stage tubes. It was $5, plus $10 to repair, and $30 for a speaker cab, and I spent $25 more for various parts to make it a 120W amplifier. It sounds a whole lot nicer than my $300 solid state amp head. I have also built some nice marshall clones, about $100 to build, sold all 5 of them for about $300 each.
The only bad thing is since I use solid state diodes for the power supply, I have to integrate a delay in it so the tubes don't get hit with power until the filaments warm up. I enjoy putting old-tech things to new uses. I have a cap/resistor meter with the old cat's eye tube (dont remember the tube number right off) that my grandfather gave me. It's pretty accurate.
I've never really found a solid state amp that I like. I only use them for vocal amps and PA amps for live gigs.
I just wish I had some original 12AX7s. The ones I have are Svetlana's, and they don't sound all that great. Used USA brand/European tubes usually sound better than new svetlanas.
