What I am always looking for is a guitar amp simulator for amp players.
It's not a myth — there exists amps that virtually never hit a wall, no matter what you throw at them. I think it is a balance of the perfectly inadequate output transformer in conjunction with the perfectly matched struggling power supply (also no negative feedback). They seem to buck the signal off the rails — the harder you push, the harder they buck. Doesn't ever turn to pure mush, just increasingly bizarre behaviors that truly rock.
The clearest and most exagerated example I can think of is Neil Young's Live Rust album. You can hear Neil heat up the amp by listening to Powderfinger, then hear the full sagging Deluxe glory in the following tune, Cortez the Killer. Pretty much all of that is coming from an early Fender Deluxe with an Echoplex into the front acting as a clean boost (there's a lot more to his rig, but this is the meat of it).
These types of amps are increasingly rare birds, and unruly loud when operating in this mode (can be obnoxious while tinkering — think 115db bagpipe/banjo), and I really believe many people would very much enjoy a more manageable version of the experience if it could be even 80% emulated.
The answer is probably not in the spice models, because we are talking way off spec. (basically a sustained system-wide failure — rolling cascading brownout?)
It seems like it should be within the realm of possibility... some combo of brickwall limiting, wave shaping, envelope generator / VCA, parallel gain stages... somehow.
A friend and I are going to tinker with the idea, but neither of us are amp techs nor coders, so we will be limited to synthedit and open source, just hoping for more of a fun proof-of-concept outcome.
It's an untapped niche as far as I can tell — someone should do it right.
Please — no corporate enforcer goons insisting it's already been done. This is no way directed at or about you in any way, shape, or form. What you got just ain't it.
