Solid State for Rock and Tubes for Jazz, Yes or No

Wolf,

I guess my point in a nutshell is that all music can be done well either way if done right. Its what it takes to do it right that matters. The devil as usual is in the details. I find impedance matching considerations most important for electronic music. Most modern electronic music should sound tight and powerful, not loose and flabby. Acoustic music is a different matter. A little looseness and flabbiness there might actually sound good to some, but I am finding what works well for electronic music also works well for me with the rest. Power/efficiency matching and needs is a totally different and equally important issue.

Yeah, I don't have a S.E.T. Tube amp, I have the brawnier Bob Carver Cherry 180M Mono blocks, the amps have 12 KT88 tubes and put out about 200 watts per channel, and my speakers are not all that inefficient, 91db.

How ever one day I would like to try out a pair of S.E.T. Amps.

I run two different SS amps in two systems.

My main system uses Bel Canto Reference 1000m Class D monoblocks, 500w/ch, with a tube pre-amp friendly 100 kohm input impedance (unbalanced), 1000 damping factor fed from ARC sp16 tube pre-amp driving large OHM Walsh speakers that are known to benefit from high damping. THe sound is fast, vivid, powerful and articulate at ANY volume with any music. About as good as it gets I would say

ONce when the BCs were in the shop, I used my TAD 125 Hibachi monoblocks as a sub in their place. THese are 180w/ch SS and designed to provide tube like sound in a SS design. These have significantly lower damping and lower input impedance than the BCs. The sound is also quite good though not as much muscle and slightly less articulate in the bass compared to the BCs. The difference in sound corresponds exactly as I would expect from the differences in power and impedance ratings. You would likely not realize you were missing anything with the TADs unless you heard them in comparison to the BCs. THey still sounded really good, but not as good as the BCs.

I also have smaller OHM Walsh speakers in my second system. These have smaller Walsh drivers that are not as challenging for an amp to get a vice like grip on the driver for optimum control, articulation, detail, etc. They work even better with the TADs.

The TADs do have a lovely tonality in the midrange that I fancied compared to the BCs, I suppose part of their SS tube sound design.

Just an example in my case of how these kinds of specs actually turned out to be useful in choosing gear that works really well together.

There are excellent versions of each system. The idea is to get the best amp you can ...not how electrons move within the circuit.

Wolf said it all. Exactly right.