Solid State vs. Tubes - What if Transistors came first?

The wattages quoted, 30 something, is pertube, in a pushpull amp you'll double that.

Oh, so bridged mode allows a 50% increase without exceeding distortion performance standards.  I forgot about the RM-200 which I also liked and heard many years ago.  I doubt that Kevin Deal is selecting tubes which only exceed specs as many people reported excellent results with NOS and other brands of current tubes as well.  I just thought that pushing the tubes harder, if that's what 100+ watt per pair might due, would lessen their effective life.  I know several friends with Audio Research gear of the 1990s/2000s who decry the short lifespan of their output tubes.  

My output tubes are run conservatively (6-6BG6) to produce 125w.  So cool that the transformers are just barely warm to the touch after 3 hours of dynamic music listening.  They last about 3,000 hours (luckily they are NOS and cost only $7 a tube).

 I owned a lot of amplifiers with krell being among them. I started out with solid state but once I found SET I changed my thinking entirely.   Lower powered triode tube is definitely my preference with much better Soundstaging and imaging then I've heard from the best solid state.  Also tube seems to convey the emotion of a performance better than solid state, I'm not sure what does this.  Then I tried out OTL and definitively preferred that over SET.  To my ears it seems to combine the best of solid state and tubes.  But you do need proper easy to drive speakers for OTL and SET. 
 But I still run solid state for my bass amps which go up to 60 Hz. 

One huge thing I have noticed is that solid state gear responds dramatically to power cord/AC line changes.  I decided to swap my PC’s around on my gear and the results are huge.  Placing a Transparent Reference Gen 5 power cord on my Krell Vanguard allowed the music to expand, become more relaxed, and high frequencies became more a part of the soundstage, rather than being over exaggerated.  Very tube like actually...fuller, warmer and more dimensional.

most never used snubber circuits to deal with the fact that diodes ring.

Actually its the power transformer that rings, which is why snubbing the rectifiers is often not that effective. HEXFRED rectifiers help, since it is the capacitance of the rectifier interacting with the inductance of the transformer that causes the ringing (otherwise known as a 'swept resonance'). But is actually the transformer that is doing the ringing!