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Something I've thought about alot actually. Triodes pretty much exclusively generate even harmonics. The 2nd harmonic is you probably know is the octave and is always musically related to the note played. The 3rd is the octave and half and may or may not be in the scale. The more spectral material this is not musically related to the fundamental is just more white noise vail to listen through. The extreme example of it is the dramatic reduction in clarity on a heavily distorted guitar. You can't play complex voicings and hear what's going on very well and it creates all sorts of interesting but unmusical intermodulation distortion.
Geoff, I was wondering something about the neve preamp design. Normally transformers generate primarily 3rd harmonics but the DC across the primary winding on the output tranny will add some 2nd too since normally the bilinear transfer curve is symmetrical (looking at the integral of the signal) but the DC shifts the symmetry so that negative values distort sooner...are my assumptions wrong?
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