Quick question. Can I pull the power tubes out of my Triple Rectifier to reduce power to 100w, or 50w, without doing damage? If so which tubes? Just wanted to know if it is possible and if it turns the tone to sh@!. Hey Bleeding! Do you know about this as you do everything else?

Thanks man

You can do it with some peaveys, don't know about mesas though.

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In Triple and Single Recto's you cannot safely pull tubes for reduced power. In Duals you can pull the inner two OR outer two to make it run about 50w. If you do this it changes the impedence, I can't remember which way. I personally do not find this to have a pleasing effect on the tone. A Dual Recto with two tubes pulled is going to sound very different from a Single Recto.

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Alright. Problem with a triple rec is you have 6 tubes, so the division of impedance isn't as easy as with 4.

See with 4 tubes, pulling 2, you halve the output impedance. But with 6 pulling 2, you split it down to 2/3rds. So from 16 ohms, that gives you 10.6 ohms. Good luck finding a cab for that. Impedance matching isnt an absolute, but big mismatches stress the transformer, and overall it makes it sound terrible.

Furthermore, pulling 2 tubes drops about 50 watts from output, but compared to 150 watts, thats like... approximately 1.5 dB in volume reduction. Thats NOTHING.

The big change that happens is that the poweramp loses some headroom, and can be driven closer to distortion. But in distorting a poweramp, you narrow the frequency bandwidth and cut off the high highs, and low lows.

So the first thing you immediately hear when pulling tubes is a loss of bass, and overall clarity and tightness. And in some cases, your gain may sound less saturated, which i cannot explain.

Pulling tubes is just a bad idea. I dont recommend doing it ever. Unless of course, somebody wants a more vintagey squashy sound with less bass and clarity. But even then, gotta match those impedances.

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