Tube Watts vs. Solid State Watts - Any credence?

"Tube amps have no bass" seemingly doesn't address the countless tube bass amps like the amazing Ampeg SVT that's been around since 1969…Mesa made an astonishing sounding tube head in 1983 or something that a dude in my band back then used. Also note that tube hifi watts have been proven in many scientific studies using sine waves, pink noise, grunge music, various speaker loads, various bong loads, yo mama, and luddite resistors to illustrate the fact that tube watts are more fun. My Jolida 502p sounds best using the 4 ohm tap…it's a fave. Another note about tubes…the Woodstock ('69) sound was powered by piles of McIntosh tube amps under the stage, a fact I recently discovered that makes me happy.

Thanks Bombaywalla. I really enjoyed reading the 1983 Atkinson and Messenger interview of Mr. Johnson. It was like taking a trip back in time.

IMO, since that time, ARC has made many significant refinements to their technology that have taken its product line many level beyond where ARC was holding back in 1983.

Wish I could say I understood the patent app stuff ... but I didn't. I'm not a EE.

I think Mr. Johnson wisely commented that trying to judge the quality of an amp by throwing around cold stats like slew rate, phase angle shift, bandwidth, and so forth is a fool's errand. It made perfect sense to me when he said many technical factors are taken into consideration when designing an amp that sounds good. To even think that a perfect amp can be viewed as "gain on a wire" is an absurdity.

Thanks again.

well some of them isn't most of them. it's nature of tubes and output transformers. they're weak when impedance of speaker goes down on low frequencies.

Some actually think that only tubes can make the bass sound right. Or at the vey least something like Lamm hybrids.
This is probably a slight exaggeration and a matter of taste and speaker choice, but I can see a strong point.

Tim deParavicini (EAR) has said that he can tell what an amp's bass will sound like by looking at the power transformer. For bass, the larger the better. Unfortunately, the larger it is, the worse it is (all else being equal) at high frequencies. An amp designer has to balance the two against each other and find the best compromise.