What amps do Electrical Engineers own...why?

I am an Electrical Engineer also. I have designed, built and modified many amplifiers, crossovers, speakers, and other equipment. My criteria for purchasing amps are:
1. Cost. It must be within my price range.
2. Sound quality in my system (not in the store).
3. design and construction quality. It must be designed and constructed well.
4. Specs in the sense that the amp must be able to not only drive my speakers well, it must also match with my pre-amp, operate at the correct voltage and current ratings, be stable over frequency and power range (not oscillate under strange loads) and most important to me, the amp must not color the sound. I try hard to find equipment that minimizes coloration. I want my music to sound as it was intended to sound.

This logic applyies to tube amps as well as solid state amps. I am a music lover. I was a classical violinist (also played sax, clarinet, basoon, oboe, and other instruments). I know what instruments are supposed to sound like (taking into account variations between instrument sounds and quality of contruction).

I equally appreciated a well designed/contructed solid state amp and a tube amp. In my opinion and decades of musical and technical experience, I see nor hear any distinction between two well designed and constructed solid state or tube amps. Yes,yes, third harmonic vs second harmonics. I know. But as an experienced designer, I can tell you that any really good circuit designer worth his/her salt takes many specifications and criteria into account in the design and construction of their equipment, and unless the amps in question are cost no object amps, there are and has to be compromises in the designs and contruction. Has to be. The Engineer has to do the best he/she can under the limitations imposed on them. Also, and really important is that when comparing amps, I believe that a fair comparison must be apples to apples comparison. In other words, the comparison must be on equal basis.

1. Specs must be close or match. Power output ratings for example. You can't compare fairly a 250 wpc amp with a 10 wpc amp and call that fair.
2. price point must be close or equal. You can't fairly compare a $60,000 amp with a $2500 amp and actually call that a fair comparison. But, establish a price point and spec range and go for it. just about every time I see people complaining about solid state amps vs tube amps, I notice that the amps in question are not even close in price or specs.

That is equivalent to comparing the sound of the top of the line piano to the cheap walmart on sale piano. Yes, the pianist will still do wonders, but they and I can both easily tell one is inferior.

So, tube or solid state? I'll take either. As I have stated several times in my previous posts, I have listened to excellent tube and solid state amps. But, (always the but), the speakers the amp must drive has a lot to do with what amp I obtain. Highly efficient speakers? Oh yeah, tube baby. or a low power but really clean solid state amp. But no way do I need 250 watts to drive stupidly efficient speakers. Unfortunately, my speakers are definitely not stupidly efficient and therefore I needed amps that can drive difficult loads and are very clean.

enjoy and Happy Holidays to you all.

hi arh:

as a an owner of tube amps, why did you go to a non-tube amp?

is it a class d ?? if so, what is the brand name ? i have listened to several non tube amps , i.e., class d and analog switching amps, and i found that they did not sound like a tube amp. I was not impressed. I even heard a hybrid class d, and still preferred tubes.

Role of Specs in purchasing decisions of EE
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I agree with Almarg. The poor specs indicate the amplifier which probably will perform poorly in one or another areas of the amplifier performance. On the contrary, good specs indicate only the POTENTIAL of amplifier to sound nice under desired conditions (e.g. difficult to drive speakers). Will it be so or not - one must hear it to decidefor himself if designer has realized these potentials

As an EE, I like good specs but at the same time I recognize that the way we humans perceive sound is something that cannot be ignored! So instead of going for the usual bench specs (which were mostly created 40-some years ago and mostly ignore human hearing rules) I look for that which might allow the gear to more closely obey human hearing rules.

Being pragmatic, I am of the opinion that if we did not have ears we would not mess with audio equipment. IOW, the human ear is the most important thing in audio. All too frequently though I see its requirements swept under the carpet in favor of the Emperor's New Clothes, the bench spec.

So I run tubes as much as I can. And no feedback, as much as I can. But I run into a lot of EEs that don't seem to understand how important the human hearing rules are; they seem to quite often have a $600 solid state amp that sounds terrible. You can be an EE and still be fooled by made-up stories!

Sspecs were once very important in audio, and still are in EVERYTHING else. I remember back in day when brands like McIntosh were considered high-end. If memory serves me, they would send techs around to your home every so many years, to bring the amps back up to factory SPEC, for the life of the amp. This was back when this was a REAL hobby. NOW, it's just a status thingy to a lot of people and the sellers / makers are just meeting a demand in the market. Just make it look a certain way and cost enough to keep the lower classes out, then declare specs irreverent! It's how it sounds that matters. And they don't even have to make any claims as to how their stuff sounds, the marks, errrr , I mean, the buyers do that for them. It's the perfect setup!! Only in audio!!!!.