Considering the New Tekton Design Encores? AND Owners Group - Experiences/Questions

@david_ten Of course being solid-state, there's a foundational weight and heft to the Pass Lab's XA25 in the bass region due to its 500 damping factor that accompanies its very beautiful midrange. It also only consumes 240w and emits much less heat into my new dedicated/treated sound room upstairs. The additional heat from 8x 300bxls in the Allnics forced me to put a thermostat sensor in the 20'x14'x8' room which forced the hvac to kick on constantly and made it too cold in my home. Also the AC makes a lot more vent noise upstairs as the system is in my attic which annoyed me because it obscures fine detail. Finally, the price of EML 300BXLS have increased significantly from $750 to $935 a pair with no end in sight. The practicality of retubing the amps with 4 pairs of them moving forward will be way too painful financially for me for how often I listen. I constantly had anxiety about wasting the tubes useful life when the phone rings or I'd get sidetracked and I'd forget to turn them off for hours.  I didn't sell them for sonic reasons, it was mostly just for reasons of practicality and that I actually find the XA25 to be very SET-like in sound signature. I agree with Terry London's review of them, it's pretty spot on. I was going to use the XA25 as a background music amp to spare my tubes wear and tear, I didn't expect the XA25 to replace them. 

@jcarcopo  Thanks so much. Your reasoning and choice are so very clear now. Super helpful for my understanding. As an aside, I did not realize that the XA 25 had the 'highish' damping factor that it does. 

@david_ten Yes, actually all of it's specifications are superior to the more expensive XA30 and higher amplifiers.  I assume it's because he uses only 4 large power transistors per side in a slightly different way in the XA25's. 

Yes, I can report that the monoblock Aegirs have powered the Encores without any problem, until today. I was playing a the Taiko group Kodo's album Ibuki and had the volume up to about 85-90 DB. This is a really bass-frequency-heavy album, and the biggest impedance needs happen in the bass region. After a while the Aegirs started briefly going into protection shut down. The album was fine at lower levels, and everything else I've played the Aegirs have been fine with, even at equal volume levels. I will still try out other pre-amp and amp combos down the road, but so far so good. 

@sid-hoff-frenchman Another good one is Yim Hok-man "Poems of Thunder". That 10 minute track will put my Pass Labs XA25 into protection if I turn my DAC's volume up to -3db which, to be fair, is nearly wide open. So big Kodo Drums 🥁 really strain my amp at high volume as well. I consider this quite acceptable and normal considering it's a 50wpc Class A amplifier. Other than that one track I've not really had an issue except like twice on very high gain and dynamic recordings that I was playing way too loudly in the first place.