SET the best?

LOL @antigrunge I have yet to see a post from Ralph's claiming he makes the best amps or any superiority claims. If you can find it post it here

For the record I owned a pair of MA-1's that Ralph makes and these work with a very wide range of speakers, as a matter of fact better than some solid state and SET amps, the horses for courses comment IMO doesn't apply to his amps

The only ever small compromise I found was with low impedance speakers with an impedance dip under 60 Hz 2 ohm or so, here an SS would handle better at the expense of mudiness and distortion at all the other frequencies

SET are known for their glorious midrange  depth and             sound staging but a bit soft at the extreme highs and lows ,the Bass is not as fast or has as much slam as quality solid state Bass which has much more current I have owned both , your speakers need to be very efficient , and a good powered sub is a good plus to have .

Atmo is daddy Mac.

I think the OP answered his own question

What's you favorite color?

AREN‘t you tooting your horn just a little too much? OTLs are great but only address a very small portion of speakers with high efficiency and high impedance. That may or may not be everybody‘s fare and your implied claim of superiority seems therefor to run precisely into the Western gun issues you profer.

I've been careful to not speaker about our amps specifically. But for the record, although over the years it seems as if a lower powered OTL is somehow the holy grail for many, IME such a thing is really difficult to do and impractical. Its quite true that OTLs don't like low impedances but you don't always need a high efficiency speaker to work with them because many OTLs made over the last 60 years made over 100 watts. Back in the early 1960s a set of Quads and Futterman amps were the match made in heaven and SETs simply didn't make enough power for that speaker.


When I first started out 46 years ago I had a lot of audiophile ideas about how things worked- what made a difference in the sound of a circuit and so forth. Over time a lot of those ideas (many of which came from audiophile friends of mine) died an ugly death. It turns out that if you have a command of the appropriate math you can predict how an amplifier will sound and that won't be a matter of taste since all humans use the same hearing/perceptual rules. Whether people want to hear about it is a different matter of course but you 'canna change the laws of physics!' as Scotty once put it.