tube watts vs solid state watts

Hello all. My god we've got a professor type in our midst. Happy xmas professor don. be "authorative". For my part I'm sitting in a 12'x12' room with low ceilings, listening to 7W of SET tube power driving my Quad ESL 57's to excellent levels of volume without distortion that i can hear. I have had Leak tl12+s (12W tubes) doing the same in a 20'x20' room. My experience of larger 50W of ss is that it doesnt necessarily do any better. more of that ss attack and power, but at the expense of the 'magic'. I've also owned a lentek 100w ss amp that was a bit limp in all respects despite its reputation as a Naim-beater. I am suitably confused, and agree totally with Albert that one can only put it in your system in your room and see what happens.

Watt's are Watt's period. As for tube vs ss with concern for dynamic headroom, heh, the guy that said tubes have 3 to 6 dB more head room is quite incorrect.

Tubes DO NOT scale on the power curve as SS amps do, why? Because they are non-linear, that is they only reproduce a particular scale of harmonics, hence the "tube sound".

Tubes are only as good as two factors, the tubes in use and the PSU (given a good circut design). But then the same similarities can be said about SS gear.

Ask yourself what the holy grail of tube gear is? BASS responce- now again ask yourself why this is? Now, unless your running some very efficient speaker system, SS does a much better job of reproducing the SOURCE when one considers the speaker system, which is far more important then the amplifer (any design) by any means (given equal quality to amplification).

Try running tubes on four or two ohms at full power for a full cd or record with heavey meatal music, lol g/l, I hope you have spare tubes handy when time consumes and degradates your tubes into useless glass speakeasy's.

Point is this, the sound- good tubes sound good with efficient speakers, but they are terrible at driving low impedence loads (a highly "dynamic" loudspeaker of good design). But there is one very important thing many tube heads ignore- TRUE dynamic range, I wonder does any speaker consistantly remain at 4, 8, or 16 Ohms- EVER?

NOT!

An empty tube equates to what?

Oh and BTW, one of the premire tube gear makers told me this on the phone this very night.

Think on that.

Sounds like Alpha 03 is in the SS camp.

Alpha 03, while tube amps may not be able to increase power into lower impedances, solid state amps will decrease power into higher impedances. Some speakers actually do maintain a relatively stable load. Try running a 16 Ohm speaker with most solid state amps. I think the previous posters got it right. Tubes usually clip more gracefully. Solid state usually can offer more power less expensively. Your choice of speakers and to some extent up line components may have a large influence on amp choices. BTW, I'm more of a ss amp kinda guy.

People go on and on about one brand of tube vs another, but I think that it is the audio output transformer which largely determines the sonic quality of a tube amp. It's not easy to "roll" transformers so there is little discussion of this subject.

The early success of Dyna Kit (later known as Dynaco) was due to the fact that before they designed and sold amplifier kits they were a manufacturer of top notch transformers.