Tube amps under $7500

@mdalton 

Bi-Amping is the way, at least for me.

I have two mono-blocked MC275s (running GEC A2900s and KR Audio KT88s or GEC KT88s depending on any  given day) up top and a pair of Pass Labs xa160.8 mono-blocks down under. I love how they sound together.

Speakers are BW 802D4s.

@larryi I'm told that many tube users are switching to Coda SS amps. Extended bottom end is a necessity for me.
@mdalton Sounds optimal, but how do you manage level matching, etc.?

"Sounds optimal, but how do you manage level matching, etc.?"

@hickamore 

If you're referring to gain matching different amps in a bi-amped setup, I do it with my McIntosh MEN2200 Room Correction System vis a vis its low/high pass filters/outputs as it allows me to adjust output gain between them. 

I'm sure there are all sorts of opinions on the right or wrong way to do this, but thus far it has worked quite well for me.

For me, it is not just that extremely deep and impactful bass is a low priority, I don't like the results I often hear with attempts to achieve such bass.  Often the bottom end sounds "dry" and toneless when that kind of bass is achieved.  I think it is quite hard to do proper active crossovers and bi-amplification and even adding subwoofers properly is tricky.  The bass quality of your speaker system is mostly a property of the speaker, not the amplification.  While it is possible to get some improvement by proper choice of amplifier, and perhaps by expert bi-amplification, I think it would be hard to avoid compromises in other aspects of performance or ease of use of the system.  I know people who constantly fiddle with subwoofer settings, bi-amplification level setting, etc., and that sort of attention to the system is not for me.  Some people enjoy that kind of tweaking, so it is a personal choice.

@larryi 

That kind of bass isn't a priority for me either. That said, I have full-range speakers that go down to 17hz so I don't really even need a subwoofer, though I do have some, they just aren't turned on most of the time.

I also don't mess with active crossovers, I let the speakers sort that out for themselves. While I use the low and high pass filters on my MEN2200, my primary goal was simply to take some of the load off of my tube amps by not feeding them any more signal than they needed. So I set the low/high pass filters respectively one octave above and one octave below the speakers existing cross over points. I haven't really touched it/fiddled with it too much since setting it up because it consistently sounds great, at least to my ears.