Verellen Devices OCTAL Power Tube Alternative

Let’s face it: all the effects pedals in the world won’t make your sound sound good without an amplifier, right? And a good tube amp is hard to beat, in any scenario or with any musical genre – however, they require upkeep, especially in the actual tube department, which can be a problem from time to time…until now. Master Amp Maker Ben Verellen has been working on the OCTAL, a power tube alternative, for several years now, and I am excited to bring you all info and a little demo showcasing just how they work, and what amps they can be used with…here we go!!

Octal is a plug-and-play alternative for the power vacuum tube used in audio amplifiers. Unlike traditional vacuum tubes, it uses modern electronics to deliver consistent, high-quality sound with improved reliability, durability, and efficiency.

The Octal is designed for amps with:

PUSH/PULL CIRCUIT
Not single-ended or triode connected

STANDARD 8-PIN POWER TUBE
EL34, 6L6, KT series, 6V6, or similar common octal pinouts

The power tubes’ job is to make your speaker wiggle. Your guitar strings wiggle in a magnetic field…that creates a voltage that eventually tells your power tubes (speaker wigglers) to shoot a current into a coil of wire in your speaker that forces it to wiggle in response. Voltage in/current out (aka transconductance). Octals are internally factory biased for push-pull amplifiers, which accounts for about 95% of commercially available amplifiers. A single-ended variation should be coming down the road…

Nearly all new vacuum tubes are made in just three places: Russia, China, and Slovakia. This limited production makes the supply chain fragile and prices more unpredictable. After they are made, vacuum tubes have to be sorted, matched, and tested for things like microphonics, transconductance, and stability. Over time, they wear out from heat, use, and vibration, so they need to be replaced regularly. In Ben’s opinion, tubes also handle high temperatures well, sound awesome and he hopes they never go away! But as an alternative to counter some of the issues with vacuum tubes, they came up with the Octal.

After the last couple of years experimenting…Verellen Devices learned that tubes are an important part of the picture but not solely responsible. The signal still smears through an output transformer en route to your speaker…that transformer is a reactive component that does much to color the sound of your amplifier, arguably more than the tubes themselves. Short answer, changing from tubes to Octals is comparable in scale to changing from one tube type to another. If you’ve ever replaced the EL34 in your Marshall to KT88, for example… on par with that. By all accounts your tube amp loaded with Octals will still have your tube amp’s personality.

In our demo video, I show you the super-easy process of installing the Octal(s) in your amp, and then run through how the amp sounds once they’re inside cookin’ up some sweeeet tone. They look cool, they sound great, and they take one less thing off of your musical plate to worry about, whether you’re on tour, or in a recording studio, or in your favorite practice space. Head over to the Verellen Devices website for ordering and a slew of FAQ that will answer any thoughts that might occur when deciding if these are for you or not. I know these aren’t pedals, but they really do bring a new element to ANY rig – cheers!!