The ups and downs of tube vs. SS...

@schubert makes an important point. The cost to retube a power amp should be figured in to the price to buy, and can be considerable, especially in amps that run their tubes hot. Lots of people use tube pre's with ss amps, a good compromise.

“The best tube and SS setups I've heard tend to sound more similar than different”

Best answer. And on the other end of the spectrum, a very cheap tube gear sounds as bad (or as good) as a cheap SS piece.

Atmasphere
I am a tube guy for quite while. I'm like to read articles concerning human hearing & perception of sound pressure levels and the effect of different levels of harmonic d istortion on human hearing. Any suggestions?
Nick

From my experience, you have to spend a lot to get good SS sound, whereas a cheap, beat up, vintage tube amp can sound delicious. I'm not sure about the cheap Chinese tube amps, since I've only heard one, but I'm afraid of Chinese electric items. They look great, but I question reliability, safety, and quality of components.

Guitar players almost always choose tubes.

Solid State vs Tubes. What about Solid state 'with' tubes?

By that, I mean hybrid amps, of which there are a few out there and I am in the middle of building one myself; it's sounding very nice.

The idea of a hybrid is to use tubes to amplify the small-signal voltage (phono and pre amp) and use transistors (in my case, Mosfets), to provide the current to drive the speakers (power amp).

The attraction of a solid state power amp is that is much more efficient and uses less electrical energy (juice!) for a given power output than tubes. The whole thing is more compact, cooler, requires less maintainance than a tube power amp and you have a much wider choice of speakers because tube power amps tend to only work their best with very sensitive speakers.

My phono and pre-amp both have 2 12AX7 tubes and 1 12AU7 tube in each. The 12AX7s provide gain and the 12AU7s work as buffers to match impedence with the following stages. I'm using some enhancement mosfets in class A mode as a gain driver in the power amp, followed by lateral mosfets working in AB mode (push pull). Some might sneer at AB push-pull but the crossover distortion is practically nill with these kinds of transistors so there's little reason to overlook them.

Anyway, have fun discovering your sound and look at some of the hybrids out there.