Top ten tube amps

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.

Wavestream Kinetics V-8s

Raquel makes a very good point. For that matter, the OTLs have a limited variety of speakers for which they are best suited. Within that limit, I would certainly keep Joule on the list.