I'm planning on having my peavey triple XXX head retubed soon and plan on switching from the 6L6 power tubes to some EL34 power tubes (it has a switch that allowes this) I'm also going to change the pre-amp tubes and want to put some 12AX7's that arent as high gain. Any suggestion on what brand tubes to go with. Also this head has some kind of built in nois suppressor/gate or something that I find can be annoying when trying to use my guitars volume knob to roll back on the distortion. Is there any way to get rid of this or bypass it. Also the transformers(?) are geared for extreme gain so neither of the dist. channels clean up much when rolling back the guitar's volume knob. Is there anything that can be done about this too? Am I waisting my time with all of this? Should I just go ahead and get a different head? The XXX is a really good sounding amp for clean and very heavy, but nothing in between. I actually never have the gain turned up past 10 o'clock on either one of the dist. channels. I'm finding that less is more in the distortion department. I think I might just sell the head and get a Marshall DSL100 or something of the like and be done with it. Any idea's or opinions on any of this?