TUBE AMP LOVERS - What SS amp makes you smile???

Pleasantly surprised about Nelson Pass'  First Watt J2 solid state amp.

After 3 long days and a lot of hard work putting together a dedicated high end room, I had a new Cary 805 Anniversary Edition mono block that was bad out of the box. It was probably caused by a bad 300B tube and people at Cary is taking exceptional care of me on this matter. After coming this far with the build, I decided to grab my First Watt J2 to use in the install for the time being until my 805 comes back. The J2 is a great little amp and I wasn't expecting as much performance from it as I did, but Wow! I quickly realized how amazingly single ended it sounds for being solid state in this set up.

In the 70s I had bought a Sony VFet amp (vertical field transistors) and at the time it was a long time favorite of mine for solid state until I fell in love with tubes. Nelson Pass found a use for these type of transistors and made some interesting and great little amps with his First Watt amplifier line. The J2 is absolutely magical with my 96db efficient speakers.

On a whim, and as a change of pace from my VAC 300.1a, I picked up a used Plinius SA-103 last summer at a really good price from someone here on A’gon. May too good of a price: it was advertised as mint but arrived with a noisy right channel. Who knows, maybe it was jarred in shipping.

Anyway, I listened to the amp for a month or so, and even with the noise I could tell it was very promising, if a little plump in the bottom and slightly closed in on top. So I contacted Frank Gazzo of Plinius USA (an extremely helpful fellow), who put me in touch with master tech Vince Galbo for repairs. Vince offered a full upgrade and repair package, replacing all caps and resistors with a selection he has refined over the course of a decade, improving the power supply, tightening tolerances, and other stuff. So I went for it.

Not only did this upgrade fix the noise, it vastly improved the sound in both Class A and Class A/B (selectable with a button up front). The bottom became tighter and deeper with more tonality; the top opened up, with more delicacy and nuance; mids became more liquid; and everything is more coherent.

Running in Class A, the stock SA-103 was a good SS amp. The Galbo-mod version, IMO, is a great SS amp that holds its own with my VAC. They sit next to each other in my rack, ready for the swapping of cables, and the Plinius actually gets more playing time. I’ve had some good SS amps in this system--Mac 501, Bryston 28B-SST2--and I still have an old Reference Line Silver Signature that I pop in now and then as another flavor. This modded Plinius is far better than the Mac or Bryston (no comparison, really--even the umodded SA-103 was better to my ears) and even outdoes the Class A Reference Line, itself an unsung hero. Vince was a pleasure to work with, too. In the end, I feel lucky to have received a noisy amp because I wouldn’t have found him otherwise.

What Amp makes me smile?
 Try the Rotel  RA-12 intergrated amp .Hooked it to my B&W 804 D3 speakers .Able to save a lot of $$$. Now that what makes me smile!

Right now I have only one amp to recommend, namely the H-Cat X-10 MkIII that just far exceeds any amp that I have ever heard. For many years, I had only tube amps and preamps. I loved featherweight 1.56 watt amps on very high efficiency speakers, usually with poor bass response. Larger tube amps for less efficient speakers always lacked the realism I heard with the low output tube amps.

I ended my tube amp life with the Reimyo PAT-777 300B amp on Behold single driver speakers. I fell in love with the Tidal speakers and bought them. The Reimyo would drive them, but when I tried the LSA Statement amp, it was far superior.

Accuphase but it should be mated Pre and Amp (or Integrated).  real clean and smooth