SET the best?

philjolet’s avatar philjolet2,302 posts 11-01-2009 7:49am I like SET but you will never resolve this with a post here on Agon because too many disagree. You can not get people to agree on SS or tube as the best let alone SET tubes which can have limited bass control (compared to SS especially) and only drive a handful of speakers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Yes the ancient discussion of SS vs Tube has not been settled. SET takes the tube experience to a whole new level,,.I should say, and forgot,, my tech built his UX250 with pure colbalt out trans, and that also may have added to the magic of SET. Colbalt trans are like $1000+ each and are not in current production.

And yes with SET you can not use xover type speakers.

Speakers are  critical,

Linear + Linear = SET magic.

So your choices are horns or FR.

I can listen to piano on my iPod earphones which definitely don’t go as low as 27.5Hz, but I can still "hear" bass notes on the piano ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Yes Although my FR specs say 40hz. lets say bass guitar riff, bass drums are hitting fq’s below that mark, Still you are hearing bass/kettle drums, maybe not as deep as say a 10 inch woofer, = You just don’t miss out on bass.

FR play bass just like Wilson’s Monolithic towers with dual 10 inch woofers,,just not as deep.

As I’ve said before, all types of tube amps can sound great, or less than great, depending on specific implementation and personal taste.  My favorite amp is a custom-built 35-watt OTL, my second favorite is a pushpull 252 tube amp, and the third favorite is a parallel SET design.  All of these can handle reasonably efficient speakers that are easy loads; there is no reason to exclude multi-way speakers from consideration.  Of my own amps (two pushpull, one SET), my pushpull 349-tube amp is my favorite—it is around a 5.5 watt amp, and it powers a three-way horn-based system.

alexberger472 posts 05-26-2020 1:30pm IMHO, SET are most transparent, best in texture and tone, most organic and musical. They need sensitive speakers. But in any case, the sensitive speakers are MUST for any good, musical system. SET sound quality depends a lot from parts quality: tubes, transformers, capacitors, resistors,... So a good SET can’t be cheap to built. SET are best for acoustic music: classical, jazz, vocals. If you listen electronic music, POP, rock - there are better options than SET amps. I will never go back to transistor amplifiers and low/mid sensitivity speakers. Regards, Alex.

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Very well written post here I will say its only been in the past 10 yrs that FR speakers has come into new high fidelity development. Fostex seems to be still struggling getting rid of its characteristic **The Shout*,. Maybe they have in a few recent models,,I don’t know. AER, Voxatix, Cube and my DavidLouis are Fr to consider pairing up with a SET. The magic of a SET is only limited by ,,well obviously as Alex mentions, quality parts of the amp’s build,,,but also limited by the quality of the speaker, whether horn or FR. The finer voice of the speaker = more magic opens up with the SET. Once you heard the magic of a SET via a high end FR , PP amps lose some of their emminence.

Caveat in order here, light jazz/classical chamber SETs shine. For big orch swing jazz/heavy blues, big orchestra, then PP is the amplifier for the task. And yes a PP amplifer(under 100 watts)  will work just fine with a FR speaker,, provided the db sens is not higher than 95db.

THe DLVX8 is 95db. DLVX6 @ 93. Best sens for a FR is 93-95db.