This is the course of events that led to the virtually unthinkable release of smaller Fender amps that used EL84s, such as the Blues Junior (the early-sixties Tremolux, which briefly carried EL84s, being something of an anomaly). From the late eighties to late nineties no reliable current-manufacture 6V6s were available, so few manufactures designed new amps around this tube. The 6V6 was used in many Fender designs-the Champ, Princeton, and Deluxe lines among them- some great vintage Gibson amps like the GA-40 Les Paul Amp of the nineteen-fifties and early sixties, and countless others. They produce about half the output of their big brother, the 6L6, and are therefore more easily driven into distortion. Smaller American-made amps of the nineteen-fifties, sixties and seventies most often carried 6V6 tubes, which are known for their juicy, well-rounded tone and smooth, rich distortion, which occasionally exhibits an element of grittiness that is not necessarily unappealing.
Think small-tweed amp and you're hearing the 6V6GT.
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This is the tube of anything from the Fender tweed Bassman and blackface Twin and Super Reverbs, to early Marshall JTM45 heads and "Bluesbreaker" combos, to the Mesa/Boogie Mark Series and beyond. In less efficient, but juicily toneful, cathode-biased designs (socalled "Class A" amps) like TopHat's Super Deluxe or Carr's Rambler, or a mid-fifties tweed Fender 5E5 Pro, a pair of 6L6s will put out around twenty-five to thirty watts. A pair of these will generate around forty to fifty watts in an efficient Class AB amp a quartet (with two pairs working in teams on each side of the phase-inverted signal) can put out up to one hundred watts. This is the big-amp output tube traditionally seen in American-made amplifiers, and it has a bold, solid voice with firm lows and prominent highs, which can be strident in loud, clean amps, or more silky and rounded in softer, "tweed" style amps. Think "big Fender amp tone" and you're thinking 6L6 (also sometimes substituted for the interchangeable 5881, essentially a ruggedized 6L6). A handful of contemporary makers still offer amps with KT tubes, and a few even manufacture unusual designs using more esoteric tube types, but you'll see one of those first four in a good ninety-nine percent of amps you encounter today.
The four most common output tube types are the 6L6GC, 6V6GT, E元4, and EL84. Today, only about half a dozen varieties of output tubes are regularly used by contemporary amp manufacturers, and just four of these are seen in any great numbers. Many, many types of output tubes were used in the glory days of thermionic devices, when they appeared not only in guitar amplifiers, but in radios, stereos, TVs, and many other applications. Your clue here will be that there's usually only one rectifier, but at least two matching or similar output tubes in any amp, other than small single-ended "practice" amps such as a Fender Champ or a Gibson GA-5. Output tubes can be recognized as the biggest, or at least tallest, tubes in the back of your amp, although a tube rectifier (if your amp has one) can also be mistaken for one of several output tube types.
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