Archetype: John Mayer X - Who’s trying it?

As someone with little experience in amp sims, does anyone have any thoughts? Is this where tube purists and modern technology converge or just a cash grab?

the sims keep getting better, but they don't really connect like an amp, and I mean even when you have an amp in the iso booth or you're recording an amp in the big room while playing in the control room. Soon though. Fr some people it'll work... heavy distortion or little to no distortion is great now from the better sims, and they sound pretty close to the real amps once recorded... and I've owned most of those amps.

Coming through monitors in a control room, I'd say a great amp sim can fool me into thinking it's the mic'd up amp in an ISO box down the hall. So I'm not surprised if he couldn't tell the difference; it's just a different use case. This one intrigues me cause it seems very focused on the mid-gain clean breakup thing, and I think one of SRV's Dumbles.

Look the sound fools my ears and has for awhile, but it can't fool my hands. An actual amp blazing somewhere I'm the building just connects with me and I play with more feeling and take more risks improvising. The amp just never does the same thing twice so you might as well have at it. If I'm going to use modelled its for layering

I've always been suspicious of dumbles. I don't like goopers, epoxy is glue, it's not for making your product unsetvicable by anyone but you. Howard Dumble's amps are mistly modified showmans withectra circuitry. I've tried a real one at a fancy nyc rehearsal space and it sounded good, really good, but I felt like it choked off a lot of my exoression compared to the trainwreck there. That was an amp to be tamed to be sure, but it never felt like it was taming me. Now that the basic circuits are out there it's easy to see the difference in approach. Its classic old amps but Howard added features and circuitry vs Ken who removed as much as he could without the amp being completely unstable.

That’s 100% valid, I agree with you for recording and improvising, anything analog is more fun, even vintage solid states, and digital fatigue is very much real. I think one of the best low-medium gain amps I’ve played was a Bludotone Bludo-Drive, but I’ve also played Two Rocks that felt a little flat and characterless. Have you ever heard a Dave West amp? Someone down the road from me used to have one and I missed getting it by minutes.

Dave West? YEAH! he was an also ran in the early boutique/custom amp market, like Jim Kelly. Somehow Mesa Boogie, Dumble, Trainwreck, Soldano and Matchless are the only guys from the 70s and 80s who still get props.