Back to the Old Sound : Music: A Van Nuys maker of amplifiers has found a growing market for his guitar equipment, which uses old-style vacuum tubes instead of high-tech transistors.

Unlike other electronic consumers, rock guitar players for years have insisted on equipment built with 1930s technology. These days, many are spending thousands of dollars on souped-up versions of vintage-style amplifiers powered by vacuum tubes instead of high-tech transistors.

And Van Nuys amplifier-maker Mike Soldano is one of the leaders of this technological retreat. The 35-year-old Seattle native has during the past 18 months sold $1 million worth of hand-built guitar amplifiers to the rock elite, including such players as Eric Clapton, Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai and Lou Reed.

Growing sales of Soldano amplifiers, which with eight speakers can cost as much as $4,400 for the firm’s top-of-the-line 100-watt version, have been generated mostly by word-of-mouth by professional and amateur musicians who want the same equipment used by their heroes.

“The guys who design amps at most companies are electronics engineers, not guitar players,” said Soldano, who started his company five years ago and now has four employees. “The guys who like my amps are the guys who can hear the difference when a guitar player designs an amp.”

Music company giants learned that lesson in the 1960s and ‘70s when they started selling improved amplifier designs, both solid-state and tube-powered, that did not distort sounds at high volumes. The equipment was more efficient than the old designs. The only trouble was that nobody wanted them.

“Solid-state technology is more efficient, but the way tubes distort sounds happens to be exactly what guitar players are looking for,” said Jeff Burkhardt, a guitar technician at Guitar Guitar in Sherman Oaks.

That tortured tube amp sound has been the hallmark of rock guitar since Clapton, Jimi Hendrix and other innovators of the mid-1960s discovered that their amplifiers sounded best when the volume controls were set at maximum. And solid-state components designed to duplicate that particular sound fall short of the desired sound, Soldano said.

A check of local clubs or high school dances will show most guitar players there plugging into tube-powered amps, of which Soldano’s is now considered one of the best. Amplifiers are the electronics that magnify the sound of the guitar strings, then speakers distribute the sound throughout a room.

Guitar players say the difference in tone quality between old-style tube and transistor amplifiers can be as pronounced as the difference between a note bowed on a violin and the sound of a wooden spoon hitting a piece of tin. Most players are looking for an amplifier that, at increasing levels of volume, will make guitar notes sustain their tone.

The search for the old sound has also interested hundreds of young people in tinkering with amps. Soldano said college instructors in Seattle laughed when he would ask about courses in vacuum tube technology to improve his own guitar sound. He only learned about how they worked after his mother, a clerk in the Seattle public library system, brought home a handful of books and manuals that were being thrown out because they had been declared obsolete.

“I read them cover to cover,” said Soldano, who studied physics and industrial arts at Western Washington University but did not earn a degree.

Soldano, who played in heavy-metal bands during the 1970s, said he was disappointed with the sound of a top-rated and expensive tube amps he had bought in 1980. For the next two years, he tinkered with various combinations of components, drawing largely from the work of Leo Fender, the late founder of Fender Musical Instruments, one of the world’s largest electric guitar and amplifier companies.

In 1982, while working in the basement of his parents’ Seattle home and using the basic design of a 1950s Fender bass guitar amplifier, Soldano said he mis-wired a particular section of his experimental amp and by chance found the sound he was looking for.

“The way I achieve the distortion is different, and I just stumbled onto it,” Soldano said.

By 1985, Soldano had sold a small house he had purchased in Seattle and with the $13,000 he earned in the transaction, opened an amplifier shop in Hollywood. He sold his first amplifier to a longtime friend in Seattle, but had to repair guitars and amps for a year to pay rent.

Soldano said he was ready to call it quits when he went home to Seattle for Christmas in 1986. But when he returned to Los Angeles, there were messages from longtime rock singer and composer Lou Reed, as well as guitarist Vivian Campbell. By summer, Clapton had his Soldano amp, the 40th sold, and the word spread quickly.

Soldano earned some cash to expand his business to its present Van Nuys location by agreeing to design an amplifier for the Japanese conglomerate Yamaha. He said the Yamaha version of his amp, which will sell for $1,049 and include speakers, will make the Soldano sound available to more guitar players.

But the tube amplifier technology is so outdated that Soldano must buy the vacuum tubes from the former Soviet Union, which, along with China, is among the last large-scale producers of high-quality vacuum tubes. By the 1960s, transistor technology had, in the West, all but replaced vacuum tubes, which were used to power radios, high-fidelity systems and military equipment from the 1920s to the ‘50s.

Demand for pricey “boutique” guitar tube amps has also spawned other custom amplifier manufacturers, such as Demeter Amplifiers of Santa Monica, G. T. Electronics of Sylmar and Matchless amplifiers of Los Angeles. Those firms offer amplifiers ranging from $1,300 to $2,400.

But even the high price of Soldano amps, which without speakers cost between $750 to $2,800, is apparently no barrier to the guitar enthusiast.

Soldano said a Wisconsin man who worked in a box factory mailed him $75 cashier’s checks for more than a year before taking possession of one of his amps.

Soldano said his amps are a bargain because they can be passed on to the next generation of rockers. “I design them for 40 years of continuous playing,” he said.