Don't sell your tube amps

Obviously there are many solid state amps that do a great job as Atmasphere pointed out, and many (including my Pass XA-25) are "tube like" in their design and some are Class A room heaters. One thing often left out of these conversations is the fact that no SS amp allows you to easily swap out transistors based on your listening mood. In my tube Had amp (and in my guitar amps) I swap in 6V6s, KT88s, 77s, 120s, 150s, 6550s, etc. including various brands of those (all sounding a little different) and various smaller preamp input tubes and rectifiers. Why? It's FUN. And, as has been mentioned previously, they look and can sound astonishingly beautiful, although maybe fooling me into having fun by providing a bit of some sort of pleasant and harmonically appropriate distortion...again tricking me into thinking I'm really enjoying the music. Sad but true. Tubes can simply sound great, last a long time, and provide some listener interaction with their ease of replacement. What's wrong with that?

Biggest mistake I ever made in audio was selling an MC240 to buy a big Home Theater receiver. A Yamaha. Now, I'm 4 x 2k+ each AVRs later, and that MC240 is selling for 5X what I sold it for. And nothing has sounded so good.

Tubes will be around for a while longer...there are too many enthusiasts out there in the hi fi world to call for the demise of tubes in the near future.....BUT....Class D is coming like a freight train.....Atmasphere in the lower price points and Aavik in the higher end are both on the fore front of making beautiful , magical music. ..the tubey sound we all love without the drawbacks associated with the tubes themselves.

@mbmi 

Class D is coming like a freight train.....Atmasphere in the lower price points and Aavik in the higher end are both on the fore front of making beautiful , magical music. ..the tubey sound we all love without the drawbacks associated with the tubes themselves.m

Maybe or maybe not . Time and the marketplace will decide. If new generation class D causes people to dump their tube amplifiers by the boatload, so be it. One consistent characteristic of high end audio is that new and different is always better. Things do evolve over time. However, not always superior outcomes by default. We all shall see.

Charles

Long live tubes !!!!    Well , the amps they are in anyway.    Tubes themselves have a finite life , but that's OK so do I .