The Linguistics of Tube Amplifiers

Earlier today I fired up my 1964 Harmony H306A amplifier (dual 6V6 power tubes, 12AX7 preamp tubes, 5Y3 rectifier tube, 6SH7 for the tube tremolo circuit). My amp has been removed from the chassis as I'm putting it into a head enclosure. Without the factory cabinet and speaker, I have it hooked up to a reworked 1930-40s Jensen Bass Reflex cabinet. Sounds great, especially when I played my Epiphone Casino through it - P90 pickups can get pretty raw and edgy.

I have a few amps that I play through, but the Harmony is a "keeper". Another "keeper" is my modified (switched power tubes from 5881s to EL34's - it is British after all) Marshall 100 watt JCM 900 half-stack. Where the Harmony is bright and raw, needing cranked a bit to get crunchy, the Marshall is crunchy from the get-go. Granted, one needs to raise the volume a bit to let the power tubes bring up the bass, otherwise the distortion is a bit thin. Turn down the guitar's volume and one gets that British midrangey dirty blues sound.

At various times I have pondered (and discussed) what it is that makes a particular sound attractive. Various theories have been posed, ranging from amplification harmonics (tubes amplify on even order, transistors on odd) to clipping dynamics (tubes squash, transistors clip). Yet, these don't really explain preference, just the properties of what it is that we prefer. My question is whether there is a linguistic basis for our preference, and whether this basis is partly driven by our mother-tongue. We select various phoneme combinations (as we try to pattern-select, or learn to predict patterns of sounds, the identification of morphemes). There are attributes of the amplifier's characteristic sound that would correspond not only to implementation of speech (inflection, tone, volume, etc.), but also to phonological units. In some regards, when we hear a musical style played through the wrong "sound" - clean jazz through Marshall's, or AC/DC played bluegrass style, on bluegrass instruments - then it seems as wrong as someone screaming "I love you" in an "angry" voice. Yet, after initial adjustment, we often find the result interesting (personally, I think Hayseed-Dixie is great) - just as we find new phonological/morphological combinations interesting when we are infants learning to identify speech language patterns.

I should look to see if anyone has done research on this.