3 interesting articles from AES, Journal of Elect Engineers, Eric Barbour

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But we're looking at distortion measured at full power...You can buy a sub $1000.00 Antique Sound Labs AQ1003DT at full power will have a rating of 3%. Bad by SS standards but unheard and more pleasing at full power than the solid stater clipping at full power. The resto fo the time the amp is aroun 1%(unheard).

No one is arguing the numbers that Solid State manufacturers measure. They measure those things that make their products look better to the unsuspecting. Wow and Flutter on cd players for instance are FAR superior to turntables and so it would be prominant on the spec sheet to get consumers to buy cd players rather than a tape deck or turntable. The fact that Wow and flutter has next to nothing to do with cd players and Jitter numbers are totally left off is not surprising. One can argue the merrits of audibility of jitter but it is there in the audible spectrum and many are unflattering numbers. In a sense the number that matters is left off.

Where is linearity of Solid state amps? Why were older SS amps showing distortion etc at full power when that was where they performed their best? At lower volumes they sounded far worse...but you never saw normal listening levels. Tubes at full power get worse than at normal levels. So the numbers get skewed to making one look better than the other(or a lot of half truths).

I'm not a tube guru by any stretch, btw. My 2 favorite integrated amps under $2500.00 are SS amps. Depending on the speakers though, tubes can sound very good and plenty of others leave their Brystons, Krell, Levinsons, for tube amps.

Interestingly the Anthem Amp 1 is a tube power amp that is considered by many including me to be superior in sound to their solid state cousins. If however you need a LOT of power then 40Watts or so may not be enough...but usually 40 Watts is more than enough to drive 95% of the speakers on the current market.

I'm not saying one should buy tubes over solid state, not at all, but people do "LIKE" current tube amps better often times than similarly priced SS amps. One can say the SS has better numbers great...but better "sound" is wht I care about whether it be a tube or SS or a hybrid of the two or neither one of the two(Sugden's headmaster is neither tube nor ss).

But how do you know that 1% distortion is not audible and that figure is better than the Anthem amp? The ASL 1003 is going to generate odd order harmonic distortion as well isn't it? Unless it's a SET it will. It all boild down to this. Any well designed system will never have to go into clipping. I totally agree that when a SS amp clips it sounds horrible. But when it's NOT clipping it's transparent, linear, and clean sounding. Exactly what an amp should do. Nothing except amplify. I've heard many different speakers and that's where the problem usually lies. Prominent treble. Thin bass. I say fix the problem at the source! I look at it this way RGA. All the way up to the speaker we're dealing with a 2 dimensional signal. Amplitude vs. Time. There's no reason engineers should screw that up. Speakers are different. They have to take a 2D signal and make it live and breathe. Anyway my $0.02. Peace

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But how do you know that 1% distortion is not audible and that figure is better than the Anthem amp? The ASL 1003 is going to generate odd order harmonic distortion as well isn't it? Unless it's a SET it will. It all boild down to this. Any well designed system will never have to go into clipping. I totally agree that when a SS amp clips it sounds horrible. But when it's NOT clipping it's transparent, linear, and clean sounding. Exactly what an amp should do. Nothing except amplify. I've heard many different speakers and that's where the problem usually lies. Prominent treble. Thin bass. I say fix the problem at the source! I look at it this way RGA. All the way up to the speaker we're dealing with a 2 dimensional signal. Amplitude vs. Time. There's no reason engineers should screw that up. Speakers are different. They have to take a 2D signal and make it live and breathe. Anyway my $0.02. Peace

It is true SETs produce more distortion than just about any other type of amplifier. That is why I recently changed to PP tube amps. A good one will have only a little 2nd, third, and fourth, and fifth. SS will go up to who knows how high. SETs also go way.

I disagree that no well designed system clips. If you listen at one watt, with a CD player and 90db speakers, you are most likely clipping unless you have hundreds if not thousands of watts or your music just doesn't have any dynamics.

Amplitude vs time is simply explained in my above post. There are real headaches with global feedback. Feedback actually changes the input signal waveform, thus fidelity. The amount depends on how wide the open bandwidth is of the amp before feedback is applied. The wider the open bandwidth is, the faster the signal travels through the circuit.

There are other problems I have read about too, but the post is getting too long.

Peace.