Paimei, I am not "with" Audiofeil at any time. However, he has far more knowledge and experience in this field than you realize. He just happens to have a low tolerance of nonsense here and his posts often reflect this.
There is no way any amp can be considered to be the top performer in any regard. It has EVERYTHING to do with the speaker to be driven. We choose a speaker that we like, that integrates well with our listening room, and then we find an amplifier that is capable of driving that speaker to its performance level.
A watts-per-channel rating often has little to do with an amp's performance. I have owned the Convergent Audio Technology (CAT) JL-3 mono amps for 6 years this month. With 16 power tubes (6550 or KT88) per mono block, it is conservatively rated at 150 w Class A. But don't let the "low" power rating fool you. It can quite significantly outperform many much higher rated amps into some speakers. Just look at the whimpy output transformers on many of these highly touted amps in this thread and compare to the CAT.
With some of these "top rated" amps, go listen to some seriously complex music with a lot of bass content at high volume. During this time, pay close attention to how the rest of the music in the mids and upper octaves maintains its integrity. With many amps, the music will crumble because the amp's power supply and output transformer can not handle the load for any given amount of time. You might be surprised that often times, the higher-rated mono-block beast-of-an-amp is not the "best" performer here. And this is one example as to why this thread is stupid as Audiofeil pointed out early on.
There is no way any amp can be considered to be the top performer in any regard. It has EVERYTHING to do with the speaker to be driven. We choose a speaker that we like, that integrates well with our listening room, and then we find an amplifier that is capable of driving that speaker to its performance level.
A watts-per-channel rating often has little to do with an amp's performance. I have owned the Convergent Audio Technology (CAT) JL-3 mono amps for 6 years this month. With 16 power tubes (6550 or KT88) per mono block, it is conservatively rated at 150 w Class A. But don't let the "low" power rating fool you. It can quite significantly outperform many much higher rated amps into some speakers. Just look at the whimpy output transformers on many of these highly touted amps in this thread and compare to the CAT.
With some of these "top rated" amps, go listen to some seriously complex music with a lot of bass content at high volume. During this time, pay close attention to how the rest of the music in the mids and upper octaves maintains its integrity. With many amps, the music will crumble because the amp's power supply and output transformer can not handle the load for any given amount of time. You might be surprised that often times, the higher-rated mono-block beast-of-an-amp is not the "best" performer here. And this is one example as to why this thread is stupid as Audiofeil pointed out early on.