What is the best OTL out there?

ZD542 - Have to agree with your endorsement of Ralph Karsten. He's one of the most sincere and gracious people I've ever met in this industry.

I haven't heard Roger Modjeski's OTL's, but his transformer-coupled amps sure are good. Plus with the way he runs his tubes so conservatively, his OTL amps are likely to need less maintenance than other OTL's, which can be pretty expensive to keep tubed.

Mactone OTL monos.

Thanks for all your inputs! I see a clear convergence on Atma-sphere, and I will definitely look into it. A friend of mine has their MP1 preamp and raves about it. I suspect that something like the combination MP1 and their M60 amplifier might be very interesting. I have a pair of stacked quads to drive, and I don't need more than 50WPC.

I personally think Berning is a genius based on what I listened to (as I said I had a Siegfried and also some of his earlier non-OTL amps), but I wonder if he is overpriced relative to the competition.

A friend of mine (a famous musician and serious audiophile) swears his favorite amp ever is a Tenor. Never had a chance to look into it. On the negative side, he also said it had some reliability issue.

Atma-sphere is certainly good, if is it the best, I don't know. In my case, OTL amps bettered heavy-duty solid state amplification. I had a flagship chain - Krell FPB600 driving Dynaudio Consequence speakers. I bought Atma-Sphere MA-1 and got them factory upgraded to mk 3.2, and to my ears, this sounds better. But it happened only when I changed from 8 ohm speakers, to 12 ohm (Audiokinesis). You get the diamond edge of OTL amps only through high-ohm speakers. If not, it may sound ok, but it is not optimal.