Help What Say You - Amp choices

Are you listening to your own music? If not, you should be. You should never use entire tracks or discs to compare the equipment. Pick two or three one minute selections since longer will overload your audio memory and lead to a faulty decision. Make sure your selections encompass the type of music that means the most to you. Always listen to exactly the same selections in the same order before and after each equipment change. Do not make a decision on the first listen but go back and listen again (3+ times, if needed). Do not rush the decision since you do not want to make a mistake. You could bring a friend to help but this is your equipment so it must be your decision to make. If you cannot decide, wait one week and go listen again. If all the equipment sounds the same, pick other familiar music selections and listen again (or change the equipment). This is not an easy process so please take your time and do not rush it. Hope this helps.

Tubes have Zero issue with bass, and actually in my experience Deeper, Fuller, and more impactfull bass in many cases as long as everything else impedance wise and speaker efficiency wise are taken into consideration with much care.

Some prefer tube bass, myself included. To me the result was a richer tonal balance and this was within the same manufacturer's products; SS -v- tubes. Tubes do demand more involvement from the owner.....I like that too ;-)

Undertow is 100% correct, but you need some guidance to choose tube-friendly speakers. Generally speakers with a very smooth impedance curve, and if it nominally 8 ohms rather than 4 ohms, all the better. A tube amp with the wrong speaker can result in less than ideal bass - tubes don't handle poorly engineered speakers with wild swings in impedance very well. What speakers do you have or are you considering. Tube bass is all the things Undertow mentions, it breathes and blossoms into the room in a very 3D manner; I think sometimes the word "bloom" is used to describe it; it sounds very natural.

I would add that if no single set-up (and we're talking systems here, since everything besides the amps is NOT equal, right?) jumps out at you as 'the one', that could mean a few things:
1. you're just not all that picky and could be happy with any of these amps (nothing wrong with that!)
2. you should keep looking until something blows you away (i.e. you're not done with your search yet)
3. you haven't listened 'properly', as in all the above posts' suggestions about bringing your own favorites. when I audition things, I bring music I've heard 100+ times: as soon as it starts, I immediately can hear the differences, and if it doesn't impress me as a definite improvement (i.e. I have to really think hard about it...) then it's not 'it'