Different amplifier class for different music genres?

Not really but I had some Quad speakers once, and chucked some EL34s into my monoblocks, just to play with that setup.

Absolutely wonderful for any chick singer, or anything like that, fell right over when asked for dynamics and slam.

Sold the Quads and put the 6550s back, my stuff has to play Zappa well. ;)

+1 for Zappa. To me, Zappa's DDD recordings are an excellent reference. 

Have any of you wondered about some of the comments I see about amplifiers and speakers when you consider what a real live band (especially rock) is using to create their sound.  They are using a guitar amplifier and speaker combo, PA quality speakers and amplifiers, various quality uncalibrated microphones, a sound mixing board, lots of cables no self respecting audiophile would allow near their gear and then I see all of this talk about transient response, tube amp or solid state, Class A, A/B or D etc. with no thought about what the original source was capable of producing or how it compares to an actual live performance. 

Maybe for purely acoustical instruments with excellent mics and recording equipment one could capture something that would warrant these distinctions but somehow I doubt it.  When most of the instruments are electronic and being mic'ed and amplified and played through PA quality speakers you can reproduce the sound best with the same type of equipment.  No matter what you do you can't get better than the original source.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about some of these aspects. One of the reasons I reduced my attendance of rock and most electric jazz concerts about twenty years ago… I have been exposed to them and typically go running out during the first tune with my hands clasped over my ears (slight exaggeration). I can’t take the background high frequency distortion, frequently the tonal balance and often the sheer volume when a sound engineer sitting all the way in the back decides cranking it up makes it sound better. I no longer subject my precious hearing to them. I listen to my system at home. No crowds either.


Creating music and reproducing music are completely different things. Driving tubes to distort for a concert is a creative and not a precise process. Reproducing that one guitar sound plus all the other ones simultaneously and accurately is a Herculean task. Since each electronic concert or studio recording is unreproducible the audiophile cannot have access to the original or something that very close to it as a standard. But acoustic symphony orchestras and acoustic jazz can be a standard. Symphonic has near zero volume to the maximum your hearing is capable of interpreting, dozens of different instruments in solo and some/ all en mass. Acoustic jazz also affords a subset of these things. So, this affords us a ruler to tune our system correctly to recreate music. If we optimize these we can be relatively sure we have done as good a job of optimizing the other forms of music as well.