Tube vs. Solid State Amplifiers

Watts are watts as long as the load is a simple resistor. As soon as you're driving a complex impedance with resistance, inductance, and capacitance it might be better to say that current is current. And many (most) solid state amps use current limiters to protect their output stages from excessive current draw by their loads. A SS amp that will happily say, 5 Amps into an 8 ohm resistor, will complain mightily if the phase angle of the load shifts towards 90 degrees and the impedance  becomes much lower,  drawing current the amp can't cover, so on come the the current limiters, at far less than the rated power.

Good SS amps have power supplies and output stages that can handle complex loads, but 'watts per dollar' amps have to cut corners, and the easiest places to do so is in the output stage  current handling and power supply. 

Tubes are more interesting and for my tastes simply sound more like the real thing. Also tubes make the owner of a tube amp seem more interesting than otherwise as you can say to people, "I use tube amps" and stand back as they note how interesting that is...or they simply don't care...damn...*sniff*...

This! ^  :-D 

@panzwagn,

" Good SS amps have power supplies and output stages that can handle complex loads, but 'watts per dollar' amps have to cut corners, and the easiest places to do so is in the output stage current handling and power supply."

Over the years, as I've increased from having 45 to 180 to 200 to now 450 wpc, all solid state, the more powerful amps are not only more powerful, they are also more expensive than the one's they replaced.  With each step up I've found the result is "less constrained" sound quality.  With my current setup, my 450 wpc amp is driving speakers that are rated at 91 db/watt, so the amp is hardly taxed at all.

One of the latest updates I've made was to swap out my solid state preamp for a tube model, then upgraded the tubes and the results were significant, especially with acoustic sounds.

@mglik 

I also learnt a bunch reading through ”Is there a SS amp that can satisfy a SET guy?” but I didn't recall the AGDs mentioned there. Glad you mentioned them here because they peaked my interest. I'm very interested in such small footprint, high efficiency and what appears to be a close to SET sound. A little too expensive vs the $4.5k 2A3 SET I have my eyes on, though.
Thanks for commenting on them!

I personally like SS amps the best, but made that decision many years ago. High frequency response and reliability mostly. That being said, I haven't listened to any tube amps except for David Berning monos and those did sound very good. Hard to tell because they were not connected to my speakers.