So I bought the Willsenton R-800i

@roxy54 

The First Watt F7 should very likely be a much better match for your horn speakers compared to the Pass Lab 250.5. Intuitively the 250.5 does not seem a good match for a horn speaker. I'm curious as to how you find the F7 compared to a high quality tube amplifier driving your horns. I'm looking forward to your listening impressions.

Charles

@chmaiwald You should be able to play all genres of music with a good setup, no inherent reason your amp/speaker combo can't do it, problem elsewhere.

I have modded Klipschorns and SET amps, it plays extremely nice with the exact cuts and albums you mentioned,  EDM, electronic or really any genre. Has human warmth, along with momentum, timing, impact enough to propel and invite total involvement. My listening sessions can go from traditional vocal, lets say Nat King Cole to rock to EDM to expeimental to hip hop to jazz to classical, all very involving. 

First thing is getting timbre  and tonal balance correct, getting proper match with amp/speaker combo should take care of momentum/impact side of equation.

Over time you should play with better 300b tubes, those and 805 should have more impact on sound quality than signal tubes.

Tarun has a nice review of this AMP....

Enjoy your purchase!

Yespoke33, but that's a different amp, the less expensive kt88 one  which is also supposed to be very nice.

@2psyop Probably some would argue that „organic“ and „pure“ may be a contradiction, but I think I know what you say. And what @sns says goes for me in the same direction: Event though tube amps have their particular characteristics such as the warmth it doesn´t mean that it can´t handle all kinds of music that have very different sonic signatures. Maybe my comment on tube amps not being able to handle super clean style (such as Alva Noto) or something else was uninformed. And I´d be happy about that. Thanks for the correction! This changes the position of my goal posts. I´d be happy to achieve a warm but still linear sound that doesn´t let its qualities clash with music that may not need them.

Because the setup will not play vocal jazz only. My taste is also pretty broad, from Renaissance Choir Music to Chaotic Hardcore, from Ambient to Classic Rock and so on. So it has to retain some kind of neutrality while being tubey. This tube rolling adventure is about finding out to exactly what extend this can achieved.

@philgo01 All I can say is that whatever question I had was answered within half a day or a day via email. They also asked after I bought if everything arrived safely and if I was satisfied. The amp came double boxed with heavy foamy plastic inbetween. An info sheet inside said that with improved packaging they pushed the return rates because of transport damages to (as far as I remember) about 1%. Returning would definitely be a hassle but somewhere I read they were very helpful once it happened to someone. But yeah, China is not downtown.

@noromance I´m not exactly sure what you are referring to here. As I said my reference is the old Rotel I own, which it easily outperforms. Comparing to other tube amps was impossible. Going to other cities, numerous shops with different setups and rooms, probably even on different days to check out other amps that fit my criteria seemed not a desireable way to compare amps as neutrally as possible. Maybe you see that differently, fair enough. Sure, I could start with a smaller tube amp to get a feel for it. But as I mentioned before, I´m impatient, if this is the right word here. Why not go for the real deal right away. The Willsenton is cheap. Of the models I narrowed my choice down to it was still the cheapest while getting the best reviews. And cheap in this case means no dealer round the corner. It´s something, a gamble you might say, I have agreed on by buying straight from China. And that´s not something I´d recommend to everyone. It´s just what I did. And do I know that it is the best tube amp? I don´t. Does it make me happy and feel like I made a good choice? Definitely.

@ibmjunkman Thanks for the hint. Being able to speak german, english and polish already gives me quick access to far too many offers. I saw that hifishark.com automatically scours some Italian websites. So I may even buy a tube or so from there in the future.

That gives me the idea to set up a tube website list. I came across so many websites ever since I started getting into the topic, I definitley have no overview. I forgot the url of a dealer that just put up NOS tubes on his blog once s/he got new stock in. Let´s see.
There are some nice tube comparisons on websites, blogs and in forums. I wish they were all as extensive as this one about 6SN7s.

@poke33 Thanks for pointing to this, but it´s about the R8, not the R-800i model. They come with a considerably different choice of tubes so there´s only so much info I can take from this. Like what he says about 6SN7s.