That "tube sound" and power ratings

^^ Charles, I think human nature is the culprit: the most powerful human motivator being to look good, the second most powerful not to look bad. You fail both of those if you don't understand the difference between power and voltage if you design speakers.

BTW, the Tonian and Ocellia have both used the PHY drivers that I mentioned. I think Tonian has moved away from the PHYs but still makes very easy to drive loudspeakers.

I get the impression that 4 ohm impedance speakers became the default
load once transistor amplifiers became plentiful and affordable. It could
also be that they are possibly easier to design and build. These designers
realized that if there's a difficult load to drive, just purchase a higher power/
current SS amplifier and the problem is solved. Perhaps higher impedance
speakers are more challenging to implement and designers simply followed
the path of least resistance. Sound quality may not have been the only
consideration for this direction.
Charles,

Anyone other than Mapman want to respond to Zkzpb8 posts?

"09-25-14: Zkzpb8
From my experience I've seen a lot of tube amp owners who like distortion. Not SET guys with highly sensitive speakers, but the 10-20 Watt tube amp owners who mate their amp with a speaker rated much below 90dB."

I've never heard of anyone doing that. Are you sure they actually wanted the amp to distort all the time and not just prefer tube distortion if the amp distorts?

"A good friend of mine is a recording engineer and he always says "people love distortion"... In the studio throw a tube compressor on - and ''fatten" up the sound - warm things up. It's the same effect when someone uses a 10 Watt tube amp on a pair of speakers that are rated 25 Watts minimum. I see guys do it all the time - they're fully aware of the speaker's specs, and despite the manufacturer's advice to use more power they do it anyway. It's a seductive sound - but the product of distortion."

That's not the same thing. In the studio, what you're talking about above is signal processing. Its part of the creative process. Playback gear's job is completely different. The idea behind that is to reproduce the original event as accurately as possible. Making your amp distort on playback goes in the opposite direction of that goal. You don't want you home audio system to distort because you want to reproduce whatever is on the recording as best you can. Even if its distortion.

If anything, the move to tube amps in the last 30-40 years has been for the things that tubes do that are difficult or impossible for transistor amps. I don't see audiophiles that are into tubes doing it for any other reason then they want to get as close to the musical experience as possible.

I really don't think you have to know anything about tubes, how tube amps work or why people use them. All you really have to know to understand that they work really well for music, is that over half a century after they were declared obsolete, they are still around- and we still play them and even the tubes/transistor debate is older than many audiophiles! IOW the economics tells the story!