wrote in message
oups.com...

Arny Krueger wrote: snip

It is true that cheap-ass tubed equipment is far more technically
deficient
than some of the expensive stuff. There's no reason why a
price-is-no-object tubed amp can't sound good and accurate when that
high
price is invested in a technically sophisticated way.


That's exactly what I said. If you are willing to spend money either
tubes or solid state may be used to build good amplifiers. Good solid
state ones IMO aren't cheap either. They need (IMO) big heat sinks and
quiet low impedance power supplies.

Partly true.
A price-no-object tubed amp can sound as good in many ways. That does not
mean they are equivalent.
But output transformer saturation leads to an inherent high-pass filter that
cannot be eliminated, unless on goes with something like the Futerman OTL
design.
It is not possible, with a practical level of effort, to equal the amperage
and damping factor of an excellent solid state design.
That said, I have seen a Krohn-Hite vacuum tube laborator amplifier that was
flat from about 1 Hz to 10 mHz.
The caveat is that the Krohn-Hite was this flat only at the 1 watt level. At
higher levels, the inherent storage capacity of the output transformer
constricted the bandwidth. All tube amplifiers suffer from this at more than
low power levels.

Solid state amplifiers slow down a little when driven toward the supply
rails, but the corresponding bandwidth reduction is fractional compared to
tube amplifiers.

Tubes are high impedance devices. Speakers are low impedance devices. Making
the two work together requires the output transformer, which introduces
artifacts from the hysteresis of the iron core. Some people regard this as
beneficial to the sound. There is no point in arguing with a personal
preference. However, I, personally, have not heard a tube amplifier as
pleasing to my ear as the best solid state equipment.

I would not dispute that some tube equipment sounds better than some solid
state equipment.

Tonight, I'll be comparing Sonic Frontiers to an Acoustat TNT-200