Quote Originally Posted by fender3x View Post
What's a little puzzling to me is why there aren't more relatively cheap tube amps. The tube set used by in the SR/HB/Laney is the same as a Blues Jr. which, and can be had for around $50 on the internet. I get why boutique hand wired amp using these tubes is expensive. But I don't quite get why an amp with a printed circuit board would need to be all that costly. After sinking about $100 in a speaker and tubes...it seems like the rest of the cost can't be much more than $50-75 in a factory context.
Factory prices are always going to be a small fraction of whatever you'd pay for them retail, even from a web supplier. But there will always be those markups at each stage, which means even small cost differences can make a big difference to the retail price. There are other costly items in valve amp you haven't mentioned, like input and output transformers and normally a small choke or two. Transformers are expensive and can each cost as much as, or more than, a speaker, especially in larger amps. The chassis is normally more involved than on a transistor amp, with lots more holes to cut. The valves need to be tested (at least a basic one to check they work) and inserting them is a manual job, that can't be duplicated by a pick and place machine like PCB components can. You also need large, high voltage rated capacitors, and those cost more than the ones you need for the switched mode power supply solid state amps. So there are a lot of small things that add up to a much more costly amp.

So I'd not ask why there aren't more cheap valve amps, but how they make that particular amp and sell it for so little? No idea what components they've used, but you can bet they will be of the lowest quality they can get away with. No idea what valves, but the typical low-price Chinese valves are never as good as the Russian or eastern European valve makes. Some of this may not make a difference when new, but in 5 years or so, things may not be so rosy with the amp. Using someone else's PCB design saves them time and money which doesn't have to be recouped, and a couple of large outlets like Thomann and Stage Right taking most of the factory output of the amp save sales, marketing and distribution costs. Again, all items that are added in to the cost price per unit and then have those markups added.