Selling off Tubes for Solid State, A Cooler Love Story?

Belles!

I went from tubes (Cary Integrated) to Pass XA100.5's and have been very pleased with the sound quality. The XA amps do get quite warm however and if heat is your issue you may want to stay away from SS amps that are heavily biased into class A. Perhaps a Pass X series amp will work for you although I have no experience with how much heat they give off. 

Chuck

That’s a shame you’re finding the PL too much. I use an PL HP. No heat concern.

Must be the layout of your space that makes heat build up? With 8 power tubes, they don’t seem to be overwhelmingly hot, at least in my room.

I hear PS Audio BHK as convincing.

This is an often posed "dilemma" by audiophiles...that I just don’t get? SS amps produce heat, too. A typical SS class AB amp is going to be ~ 50% efficient. Maybe add 10 Watts per heater for each KT88, and you get an extra 40 Watts for a typical 80 Watts / ch tube amp over a comparable traditional high-bias class AB SS amp. That’s equivalent to a single, very dim, incandescent bulb. Or half of a person (since a person’s body heat is said to be roughly equivalent to an 80 Watt bulb). Double that for ~ 150 Watts/ch tube monos. Still not much.

The benefit of SS is that there are lots of "efficient" topology alternatives. So OP could certainly look at class D (~ 90% efficient), or maybe a class ABCDEFGH amp like the Benchmark one. But a "comparable" traditional SS amp is not gonna save much heat from a tube amp, overall.

You could save perhaps a few hundred Watts of heat with a class D amp. That’s still not "a lot lot". Are there a lot of audiophiles that have their systems in a non-air conditioned hut in the Thai jungle? 😂 Buy a portable AC unit and keep the amp you want. 

Incidentally, my heater failed recently during a very mild injection of fall "cold" here in GA. I tried running my high-power tube monoblocks 24/7, and it made no discernible dent in the chill. A space heater was vastly more effective.

Seriously, take a look at AGD.