Anyone recommend a neutral tube amp?

hi rfprice:

as i have indicated on this thread and in my previous comments, you should have no trouble finding a tube product in your price range which does not have the traditional tube sound. most amps are designed to be colorless. in my own pursuite of a vintage sounding tube amp in current production, i have not found one. this my loss is your gain.

pick an amp, and it will probably satisfy you. don't worry, euphonic coloration and bloom will not likely be the outcome of your selection.

I just started playing with a Music Reference RM10 MKII ($1950)which is a wonderful little amp and an incredible bargain if 35 watts is sufficient (I also listend to the RM9 which has a similar sound signature if you need more power). This is defintely in the neutral camp, and in the best sense of the word.

"Don't get a tube amp if you want neutrality..."

I have put my EAR 890 against 3 well regarded S/S amps with mostly non-audiophile people. The EAR won every time, most recently with my brother and sister-in-law who don't know the difference between a tube and transistor. After 2 hours of going back and forth they decided the tube amp was the most musical. This was hard for my brother who loved the appearance of the S/S piece. He thought the giant heat sinks were the coolest thing ever seen on a piece of electronics.

Not sure what people are saying when claiming no tube amp can provide "neutrality". Kind of like entomologists who, for decades, claimed bumblebees should not be able to fly based on scientific understanding of physics and flight. They recently discovered why but for years held bumblebee flying as a mystery. There are many tubes amps that musically soar on a regular basis.

I think you will find much fewer folks saying tubes don't soar, than folks claiming tubes are neutral. But I think Mrtennis is right that there is some convergence between SS and tubes with tubes becoming more neutral, much less obviously colored than in the past; they have always been enoyable and sometimes more obviously so than SS IMHO.

The reason tubes are accused of being 'warm' is that they more closely follow the rules of human hearing than do transistors. If neutrality is your goal, and on top of that listenability, due to the constraints of the technology tubes are the only game in town.

Some important rules of human hearing are:
1)Loud sounds mask quiet sounds
2)loudness is detected by the level of odd-ordered harmonics
3)speed can invoke emotional response, slowness often invokes intellectual response
4)ears hear on a logarithmic scale, thus 'decibels'
5)bandwidth is roughly 20Hz to 20KHz.
6)sound location is detected by phase and time

a couple of examples:
Distortion masks detail, which is why SETs can sound more transparent and detailed than a transistor amp (if the speaker is efficient enough to take advantage of the low-power range of an SET).

Getting rid of negative feedback can reduce harshness (rule #2 above). Nelson Pass has shown this in his 'First Watt' amps, and tube guys have known this for a long time.

While no amplifier will ever be 'perfect', the more the rules of human hearing are obeyed the more the result will be an amplifier that is the most neutral while simultaneously being the most musical.