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

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why not both? My house, although small, has more than one room. Tubes in one, solid state in the other. Switch on whichever makes you happy on any given day. The best of both worlds!

Like others here I've owned some powerful, high quality SS amps.  The good ones always sounded terrific... until I compared them back to back with my conrad-johnson tube amps.  Owning both at the same time allowed switching out amplifiers as quickly as changing speaker leads.  Listening back to the same material, the music was always better with tube amplification.  Always more three dimensional and listenable.  Excitingly real.  Maybe it's c-j's philosophy of simple circuits with super high quality parts but it has worked for me over the years without exception.  My music preference is acoustic jazz and classical, not sure this effect works as much with rock music.  If you like music made by acoustic instruments, try a good tube system. It's heavenly.

I drive some very inefficient electrostats that have impedance curves that drop to 1 ohm with big class A power amps.

You might be surprised to find that tube amps can manage a load like that. IME many people think ESLs are inefficient and difficult to drive but I find that isn't completely true- they are often more efficient than thought, and their load can be problematic for certain amps, depending on the ESL.

For example Sound Labs are hard to drive for solid state, as you need about 800 watts to keep up with a 200 watt tube amp on the same speaker. This is because the speaker is 30 ohms in the bass, which knocks the solid state amp down to about 200 watts, while a tube amp is unaffected. At the extreme top end a Sound Lab is 1.5 ohms and our amps (which don't do particularly well with low impedances as they are OTLs) don't have any problems with them.

1 ohm (if correct) is not crazy bad for a tube amp because it occurs at 20KHz where there is little energy. So you might want to try a tube amp on the speaker and see. OTOH, Martin Logan ESLs are typically about 0.5 ohms at 20KHz and no tube amp does them well (they sound rolled off in the highs) without a set of ZEROs (www.zeroimpedance.com) to boost the impedance.

first, i encourage you to buy a reasonably priced tube amp to compare to your SS amp. that is the best way to hear the obvious differences b/w the two. 

the tubes give you the ability to tune your sound more specific to the desires of your ear and to "match" our speakers, both sonically and electrically. 

This is a huge topic with thousands of forum pages written. dont get me wrong, I'm glad this thread started, just trying to offer you more outlets to do some quick reading, learn the basics, and get out fo the starting gate. 

GO TO AN AUDIO SHOW!! you will see literally hundreds of SS and amp units. 

also, many of us, use "hybrid" amp that have tubes in the PreAmp and SS in the Amp section. this gives most of us the best of both worlds. but again, whether a SS amp or Tube, it takes learning and practiced to get a good match b/w amp and speakers. many of us spend years playing around with different units and combos to get different sounds.
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