the best 'tubey amp - warm,smooth,liquid' ?

Zabiaud, Welcome to AudioGon and your first posting here. In answering your question disagreements have arisen that may be of some value to you or not. In any event it has nothing to do with you personally.

Regarding your 4 ohm speakers. In my earlier post I suggested a tube amplifier and offered some of my personal observations with them. I'd like to offer a bit more detail.

My speakers are 87dB / 4 ohm yet they dip down to 3.6 ohms. I was powering them with a powerful 200 watt solid state amplifier as well as a 375 watt switching amplifiers. The solid state amplifier would begin to sound congested when turned up and the switching amplifiers had no problem other than the difference in their presentation.

The Carver tube amplifiers can be run at high volume without any audible issues that I can hear. They're highs sparkle, the mids have depth and weight with solid mid bass and surprisingly powerful deep bass. They come with a switch that changes the amount of feedback which gives you a modern or vintage tube amplifier sound. They also have that relaxed feel that only tube amplifiers offer.

I suggested these because they are the first tube amps that were not excessively large, hot, and expensive. More importantly to me, they are able to comfortably drive my 4 ohm speakers while sounding much better than the other amplifiers I was using.

My personal experience with tube amplification is limited to Marantz 8B's and an MFA D75. Neither of which could drive my 4 ohm speakers beyond background music levels. I hope this has been of some help.

Whatever you decide on I hope you will return and share your experience.

Vic

I had a 360 w/ch Carver m4.0t SS Tube Transfer Function amp for many years.

This was one of Carver's efforts to "voice" a SS amp to sound like a tube amp and was reasonably successful at that.

A corollary to that was that although it went plenty loud and clear, and did well with my speakers that were relatively tube friendly at the time (Magnepan, Triangle), it was also not able to deliver balanced sound top to bottom with my other less tube friendly speakers (B&W, Dynaudio, OHM) despite also going plenty loud.

FWIW.

Mapman,Yeah I was a bit skeptical of the Carver name. After more reading it became clear these new tube amplifiers area collaborative effort. IMO and in my system I'm extremely happy with their presentation.

This is from a review, not sure which one.

["The new Carver amplifiers should be understood as a collaborative effort between Bob Carver (pictured here) and Tim de Paravicini. Bob relates the following: "Tim and I got together a few summers ago in a small California town (Sebastopol) when he came from England to do a service call on his amps for a big record company. I'll never forget that day as long as I live. Tim designed the input and driver stages, and together we designed the output stage. I designed the power supply. Tim taught me how to design the output transformer." The input signal is AC coupled to a 100 kOhm potentiometer, which defines the amplifier's input impedance. The input stage uses a 12AX7 configured as a long-tail pair phase splitter using a large tail resistor to ensure constant current source operation. The driver stage uses a 12AT7 also configured as a long-tail pair."]

Just take any tube preamp and change the caps to oil caps so you get a warm, tube like sound. It is that simple. You can also changeout the filament resistor to adjust the voltage to the tubes and warm up the sound (relax the sond). No need to try different preamps if that is all you are looking for.

The input stage uses a 12AX7 configured as a long-tail pair phase splitter using a large tail resistor to ensure constant current source operation.

:) He must be new to differential operation. You can't do that effectively with a resistor like that- you will need a proper constant current source (CCS) if you really want it to work right.... just say'n