Audiobb, I play heavy metal too and I also have a few friends in the heavy metal world and I opened for Therion when they toured here a couple of years ago. The start and stop of a Kick drum is *way* too slow for any sort of stop and start that might actually be a 'damping factor' phemon! If you look at a bass drum waveform, you will see that even in a fast double bass passage, the waveform dies out as the kicker pedal is damping the waveform. Speakers are a whole lot faster than that: even a 15" has bandwidth to 500-800Hz. The bass drum (actually a typical area where 'damping factor' is brought up) is a red herring.
Jmaldonado's comment about bass extension is non-sensical, although I have to guess that it is only based on his experience. So I will share an experience of our own:
Some years back we used the Snell Model B for our main system. The speaker is full range, and was easily driven by our smaller M-60, although it was only 89 db. We went through 4 sets of woofers before Snell replaced the woofers with a re-engineered set that was more durable. We were not damaging the voice coils- the spider part of the suspension was failing, due to the excursions we were putting the speaker through (we like to play stuff with impressive bass tracks, as with 1 Hz full power in our amps, the bass we get is a strong point in our products). Snell told us that they had the same problem with mastering houses that were doing lots of dance tracks with heavy bass (we were playing that sort of material too)- see http://www.atma-sphere.com/awards/bya/index.html
for some of the discography.
So tube amps can put as much excursion on a speaker cone as a transistor amp, FWIW. In our case, in repeated demos with transistor amps, I have yet to see one that has proper bass extension. So while I accept that transistor amps can play bass, I do not accept that they can do it any better than a proper tube amp.
Jmaldonado's comment about bass extension is non-sensical, although I have to guess that it is only based on his experience. So I will share an experience of our own:
Some years back we used the Snell Model B for our main system. The speaker is full range, and was easily driven by our smaller M-60, although it was only 89 db. We went through 4 sets of woofers before Snell replaced the woofers with a re-engineered set that was more durable. We were not damaging the voice coils- the spider part of the suspension was failing, due to the excursions we were putting the speaker through (we like to play stuff with impressive bass tracks, as with 1 Hz full power in our amps, the bass we get is a strong point in our products). Snell told us that they had the same problem with mastering houses that were doing lots of dance tracks with heavy bass (we were playing that sort of material too)- see http://www.atma-sphere.com/awards/bya/index.html
for some of the discography.
So tube amps can put as much excursion on a speaker cone as a transistor amp, FWIW. In our case, in repeated demos with transistor amps, I have yet to see one that has proper bass extension. So while I accept that transistor amps can play bass, I do not accept that they can do it any better than a proper tube amp.