I've narrowed it down...

Unsound, so why don't you give some concrete scientific back-up to that reasoning. In the real-world what I stated is the more likely scenario as to Charles1Dad attests; this is also my real-world scenario. My father and uncles all had great tube systems in their day. Me, I started with SS, was very unhappy, something was always missing, it just wasn't right for me. The more tube systems I heard, the more I understood what I was missing. My parents and several relatives are musicians, I am also, among other things, know what "real" music sounds like. In the professional music world I and most of my colleagues didn't ' select speakers first, we bought the guitars, musical instruments we liked, then the Marshals, Vox, etc.

How and why should a person say, oh, I must, it's mandatory to go speaker first? Say you inherit an amp. You don't take it because you don't have your ideal speakers? When I got my first SET amp I had big inefficient speakers that I had to change. No big deal, no harder to do that than doing it the other way around.

How and why do you believe this theory of yours?

I don`t want this to disintergrate into another tube vs SS (again, sigh)I freely admit amp'or' speaker first appraoch can work out well.

When it comes specifically to SET amplifiers you 'most' often will begin with the amp you like and just find a good efficient-easy load speaker to match.Fortunately on the current market there are many to choose from.

If you want to own SETs, you do proabably have to make that decision first and the find appropriate speakers and I suppose in the real world this might very well happen. However, if I were advising someone, I would still tell them to find the speaker the love first and then find an amp to drive it since I think the speaker has a much greater impact on the sonic signature of a systems than any other component, and then tweaked a bit through the selection of electronics, but the recording, speaker and room are at the heart of a system's core performance and sonic attributes IMHO. Of course you could find an amp first, but that would limit speakers you could audition and fall in love with - though some speakers may need high powered SS or tubes, and yes even sometimes SETs to sound their best.

Hi Pubul57,
The reality is we`re both obvious exmaples that either way is fine,it`s really no big deal. If Botit gets a tube amp first then an appropriate speaker his chances for sucess are as good as mine were. He will do well.

what is it that makes one speaker sound better on ss and another on tubes? Is this an experience item or are there specs I can look at?

Maybe you should look here first:

http://www.atma-sphere.com/Resources/Paradigms_in_Amplifier_Design.php

In a nutshell tubes drive speakers differently than transistors tend to, although you can make them do it if you add enough feedback. The problem is that when you do this, you will also rob them of the music. IOW, its not so much a transistor/tubes debate as it is whether or not making an amplifier into a Voltage Source is a good thing or not.

To this end I don't agree with Unsound, as the research that has been done in the last 45 years points to the fact that the human ear is very sensitive to the use of feedback in an amplifier, and also that it hears harmonic distortion as tonality. Another way to putting this is that you will have a very difficult time to get the equipment to sound like music and run feedback at the same time.

The B&Ws require that the amplifier be a constant voltage source which is why they don't work so well with tubes.

So if you want tubes, you *have* to find a speaker that works with them. If you go with the speaker first, you may be forced into using a transistor amp. Since most transistor amps use a fair amount of feedback, its nearly impossible to get such a combination to sound like real music- at best it will sound like a good hifi. Its that last nuanced difference that brings home the bacon!

Now you could try using transistor amps that have no feedback; there are a few around like the Pass Labs and Ayre. The problem is that transistors have non-linear capacitive aspects in the junctions of the device itself. This contributes to odd-ordered harmonics- the very thing that the ear uses to sort out sound pressure (volume of a sound).

Another way to put this is that the more the equipment obeys human perceptual/hearing rules, the more it will sound like real music. In a nutshell its easier to do that with tubes than with transistors- I am not saying that its impossible with transistors, just that its several orders of magnitude more difficult.