Quote Originally Posted by Katastrophe View Post
I know the answer is out there! It would seem to me that tube amph design would be primarily using older / simpler technology, and would thus be cheaper to manufacture.

Educate me!
The electronics manufacturing industry stopped making tube equipment on a large scale back in the late 60s. Industry is now tooled up to make SS gear exclusively. A tube amp uses a lot of now exotic parts: high voltage power transformer, impedance matching output transformer, tubes (GE closed their last factory back in the lat 80s.,) high voltage capacitors, tube sockets. These components are still made, but on a very small scale, and this costs.

An SS amp/modeller uses a low voltage/high current power transformer, no output transformer, low voltage caps and PCB construction exclusively. They are smaller, can be more powerful, and usually lighter. A lot of the amplifying circuit can be put on one or two boards, or even one or two chips.

Also there has been a paradigm shift in electronics manufacturing. Tube gear of the Golden Era for the most part was built to last, or was easy to fix. New SS gear is engineered to be disposable, and as such is designed to be as cheap as possible. This is not the best way to design/manufacture tube gear that gets treated roughly on a routine basis.

Guitar amps are a drop in the bucket compared to all other electronics.