Why do some amplifiers throw a bigger soundstage than others?

I like tube amps, particularly low-powered ones, and they do seem to present a larger soundstage than many good solid state amps.  My personal suspicion is that they do so because of some kind of phase anomaly.  I don't care if it is a kind of distortion or defect, if that is the case, it sounds good to me.  I know that transformers don't behave perfectly, particularly when it comes to phase shifting, and the amps I particularly like have a LOT of iron in them--input transformers, interstage transformers, and output transformers. 

I have very little experience of tube amps, but I do remember a wide soundstage.

However, the review I watched compared two solid state amps, both class A.

still don’t understand why one would would throw a wider soundstage than the other.

Listening is a skill. It requires lots of practice and study to learn the vocabulary of standard descriptive terms. For experienced amateurs and professionals assessing sound qualities are relatively easy and comparable across listeners. Kind of like reading X-rays. For the professional… he’ll just rattle off what this is and what that is while to the untrained eye, all you see is fuzzy gray areas.

So all this discussion about how subjective sound is, or it is some trick of the mind comes from inexperience. I can take three different experiencesed audiophiles and get exactly the same description of sound qualities of a system or changes in that system exactly and consistently. Most of the subjectivity involves words like good or better… value statements about your values… what you like and don’t like.

Back in the late ’90s a dealer let me take home a Mesa Baron for the weekend.

I was immediately intrigued and impressed by how up front and close the soundstage was (particularly the vocalist) and how it filled the room to an extent I had never experienced before. At the time I was running a Cary SLA 70 Signature (Cary’s entry level push pull amp) and the reason I did not buy the Mesa and stayed with the Cary (for the time being) was that the soundstage of the Mesa was not nearly as clean and defined as that of the Cary. As a matter of fact, the way I described the soundstage of the Mesa was as being "smoky."

Since then I have owned a couple of other amps (a pair of ARCs and a larger Cary) which provided a larger soundstage, but really nothing quite the same as what the Mesa did, and I have often wondered about that.

I did try to post a link for the Mesa, as I always thought it was a looker, but for some reason A’gon won’t let me do that.