looking for a warm ss amp....

Fishcall, inherently, some to many to most solid state amps simply are not known for their warmth. Especially at the lower price points. They are typically (and hopefully) noted for their speed, articulation, and sometimes better control of the bass regions than tube amps.

I would guess that more than likely if you found a 'warm' solid state, (unless it's a pair of $20k monoblocks), you'd be giving up quite a bit elsewhere.

But there are a few exceptions:

The Sim Audio Moon W-5 has a very nice, even a bit sweet sounding, but it's bass is somewhat congested. The W-5 retails for $5k but can be found used for about $3k.

You might try the Rotel amps. These are known to be on the dark warm side of life and usually have more than ample power to drive most any speaker. I've listened to a 200 wpc Rotel amp at a friend's house with very inexpensive metal dome tweeter speakers and was quite impressed with the sonics of the combination.

If you want warmth, bloom, speed, articulation, and bass control at an excellent price, look for a McCormack DNA 0.5 Revision A amp. There was one here on A'gon just a short time ago selling for $1500 used.

But regardless of which amp you go with, you most likely will not be too impressed with the sonics until you replace the receiver with a pre-amp.

-IMO

Believe it or not a Krell KSA100mk11 is a tubelike warm sounding amp

Audio Research 100.2 www.audioresearch.com/M100_2SPA.html

Blue Circle BC-22 or BC-22 Mk2

I'd 2nd Pass Labs Aleph 5 would do the trick. No wax build up problems either, but once in a while the lint in my belly button builds up a bit! Perhaps that is impairing my judgement?! With the Aleph's you really need to keep them running for a day or two to get the optimum performance from them, and they do run pretty hot too (class A). Also, you might want to consider running your SS amp with a tube pre-amp for the results you're looking for.

Marco