How big of a difference do amps make?

I am going from ss H/K Citation to Thor 30 watt monos. I will be doing an A/B Comparison. Cant wait.

You'll get better seperation with mono's too. If you keep the Thors, get a new set of tubes plus a couple of extras for back up and you should be set for a while.

One of the Thor monos came in today. Has new tubes and the gentleman I bought them from basicly threw in a nice set of speaker cables to boot. Hope the other arrives tomorrow.
Gotta get a couple power cords and should be ready to fire them up !!

Just got the Thor monos hooked up. Very different. Suprised at the bass from 30 watts. gotta work on speaker placement and room set up. Plan on doing an A/B with ss amp.

Interesting observation Mbovaird: "Huge difference. Going from SS to tube is great if you have very efficient speakers. Otherwise, you will become frustrated quickly."

I had the opposite experience. Switching from a 350w/ch Levinson 336 to a 100 w/ch tube amp was an audio revelation - certainly not a frustration!

In fact, in the case of my current tube amps, I learned that those 100 tube watts completely/totally belied their capability. The amps/watts simply trounced the Levinson & Parasound Halo 400w/ch monoblocks across the audio spectrum, including the bass & control of my M1 Soundlab full-range stats.