Thread: TUBES V SOLID STATE

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Post by calloway January 5, 2011 (51 of 53)
...having had both a great ss amp....goldmund 29m ...and a current SET that is among the 'best in the world'....not my words but those of the reviewers and owners of this SET...and combining those monoblocks with a superb tubed preamp..great tube sound can be very difficult to beat...at its best...there are arguments for and against and nobody is correct.

Post by stvnharr January 5, 2011 (52 of 53)
rammiepie said:

finally a voice of reason.

But one positive about tubes.......they used to heat my basement in the wintertime but had an adverse effect in the summer months.

Rammie,
Yup, nothing like having a big tube amp like the BAT in the basement audio room in the winter for a nice warm cozy feeling. But you have to run the air conditioner in the summer. The real winner is the power company!

Tube amps, whether they be EL34, 6550, or 6C33 based, are great if you like rolled off highs, low damped bass, and a nice euphonically colored midrange. I liked this sound for a long time.
Then I built a solid state amp, had solid well damped bass, proper highs, and midrange equal to the BAT.

A lot of speakers and room tend to be a bit on the bright side, and a tube amp, with it's warm-ish lush-ish sound is appealing to many as a nice electronic playback sound. And single ended triode amps do have a devoted following, but require careful speaker matching to be most effective and to overcome the frequency response deficiencies of the amps.

Post by Fitzcaraldo215 January 5, 2011 (53 of 53)
stvnharr said:

Rammie,
Yup, nothing like having a big tube amp like the BAT in the basement audio room in the winter for a nice warm cozy feeling. But you have to run the air conditioner in the summer. The real winner is the power company!

Tube amps, whether they be EL34, 6550, or 6C33 based, are great if you like rolled off highs, low damped bass, and a nice euphonically colored midrange. I liked this sound for a long time.
Then I built a solid state amp, had solid well damped bass, proper highs, and midrange equal to the BAT.

A lot of speakers and room tend to be a bit on the bright side, and a tube amp, with it's warm-ish lush-ish sound is appealing to many as a nice electronic playback sound. And single ended triode amps do have a devoted following, but require careful speaker matching to be most effective and to overcome the frequency response deficiencies of the amps.

Well said. With regard to SET's in particular, I personally have never "gotten" the fascination that some have for this technology. One of my closest audio friends has been gaga over this for about 15 years. I have heard various highly prized incarnations of it frequently. Not only is it colored and deficient in frequency extension, but its character changes quite dramatically based on specific speaker load characteristics. And, your speaker choices are quite limited in the first place to only the much smaller numbers of decent models with very high efficiency. To each his own, I guess.

One thing I was looking to cure in a recent upgrade I did was to eliminate warm up delay in my amps. Tube amps, like the solid state Krell Class A monoblocks I recently replaced, typically take about a half-hour or so to warm up fully and sound their best. My recent addition of a Spectron Musician III Mk. 2 Class D helps me overcome that. It is on all the time, though it draws 50 -60 watts at idle. So, on evenings when I only have an hour or so to listen, I no longer have to waste half that time while the amp warms up to its full sonic potential. That's a big plus to me.

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