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

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!

Dave_b, I used to be pretty skeptical about power cords and such, it's also interesting that you mentioned SS being sensitive. When I bought my Yggdrasil DAC it was really bright. I initially thought that it was something downstream, an interconnect issue or something, but after spending a ton on ICs, I eventually relented and bought a hospital grade isolation transformer after a number of people suggested doing so, it fixed the problem. When I bought my tube preamp Don Sachs told me that I needed a good cable for it, but he suggested that virtually any heavy gage cable would be fine, so for tubes it's just a potential issue, and it would seem that for SS, it's not only about supplying sufficent current, but depending upon your incoming power it may well act as a filter, a filter that a tube based component apparently doesn't need. If so, that could also help explain yet another reason many prefer tubes. If they had unaddressed power issues when using SS gear, assuming for the sake of argument that tubes don't share that problem, would be one more reason that many prefer tubes.