Top ten tube amps

Audiojoy - You are right about the high end missing the point about musicality. I came to this conclusion at last year's CES/THE show, where the vast majority of systems, regardless of price, had an excess of upper midrange energy and a lack of mid-upper bass energy.

The mention of a car radio is interesting, as I had an experiencethat bears this out. The BSO was featuring a deaf percussionist (Evelyn Glennie) one week a few years back. I heard / read good things about her, so I went. My seat was so bad, I didn't really enjoy the performance. I later bought the CD, and thought, unusual, but not great. I then heard her perform the same piece with the Detroit (or was it Minneapolis) symphony on NPR Radio, ov er the factory stock torn-up paper speakers in my 83 Ford Fairmont, and was spellbound. Somehow, the orchestra and Ms. Glennie just hit it off together, and their ability to make music came through even on a terrible system, and was more enjoyable than the OK performance on the CD played over a high-end system. I've wondered if the lack of enjoyment at Symphony Hall was really due to my bad seat, or if somehow, they just weren't pulling it together musically. The sound at Symphony Hall was certainly better, even from my seat above the right side of the stage.

Berning Siegfried

Oz very well spotted it was the RM200, I think i had better listen to the RM-9. Thanks

Honest those are interesting observations. Car radios have always sounded very musical though not of 'hifi' quality. those tweeter sized speakers probably have great speed and the battery might be helping as well. However can only surmise that your concert hall experience must have been due to a poor performance on the day (unlikely) or the acoustics disrupting the actual performance you were meant to hear. With my arguments a highly musical sounding system should be able to differentiate between good and bad performances. Indeed, those that know certain pieces very well can differentiate talented musicians from less talented ones from the way the score is played and the amount of emotion exhibited by that individual or band.

With due respect to the contributors to this thread, there are not a lot of people out there who have enough meaningful experiences with enough tube amps to put together a top-ten list. What can safely be said is that the following tube amp builders, in no particular order, have a reputation for making well-built to very well-built amps that can sound very good in the right systems:

- CAT (Convergent Audio Technologies)
- VAC
- Atma-Sphere
- Lamm
- Air Tight
- Audio Valve
- BAT
- Thor

The above list is partial and derived only from what immediately comes to mind. The list is also overly simplistic, as I could also have a category for "Very model-dependent" (Audio Research, Cary), "Very era-dependent" (Jadis), "Only now playing in big leagues" (Siegfried vintage VTL), "Great stuff, but builder dead" (Audio Note Kondo), etc.

The thing to remember is that the vast majority of tube amps, regardless of their wattage ratings, will not have power supplies or output transformers of sufficiently high quality to allow them to properly control typical, modern full-range speakers; in fact, it is rare to find either a tube amp or speaker designed with the limitations of tube amps in mind (e.g., CAT amps have massive power supplies and really high quality output transformers that allow them to handle almost any load, and Verity speakers tend to have benign impedences and low phase angles that a good tube amp can handle), and they are invariably expensive. Another approach, which is an intelligent approach in my opinion, is to run a tube amp with monitors presenting an easy load (e.g., ProAc) having little output below 50 Hz. or so that are partnered with a sub.