Tube vs Solid State?

[300A]

Too bad some are really out of it. If you, Crafts and Skeptic, understood what DA and DF meant, you wouldn't have made such stupid comments.

DA is the most important of the two, and is the slow release of electrons from the insulation when discharging or reluctance to accept electrons when charging.

Instead of discharging and charging perfectly, the incoming note, say bass note, there is a slower release, causing a distortion (not harmonic or intermodulation distortion that is typically measured) of the note. This is Physics and can be measured. This causes the note to sound fuller, extending longer, Not an actual change the amplitude as you would try to have us believe.

One can easily do ones own test by simply purchasing two capacitors of the same UF, one electrolytic/bypolar, and one polypropolene and inserting them into a circuit. I don't think the public needs you twos permission do they???????? Let them decide or are you afraid of what they might find out??

As mentioned before, in audio subjective testing, DBTs are worthless. Scholars themselves won't use the terms "factual" or "proof" only "indicates" or "seems to indicate". Hardly factual.

Get back to reality.

[mtrycraft]

Too bad some are really out of it. If you, Crafts and Skeptic, understood what DA and DF meant, you wouldn't have made such stupid comments.

DA is the most important of the two, and is the slow release of electrons from the insulation when discharging or reluctance to accept electrons when charging.

Instead of discharging and charging perfectly, the incoming note, say bass note, there is a slower release, causing a distortion (not harmonic or intermodulation distortion that is typically measured) of the note. This is Physics and can be measured. This causes the note to sound fuller, extending longer, Not an actual change the amplitude as you would try to have us believe.

One can easily do ones own test by simply purchasing two capacitors of the same UF, one electrolytic/bypolar, and one polypropolene and inserting them into a circuit. I don't think the public needs you twos permission do they???????? Let them decide or are you afraid of what they might find out??

As mentioned before, in audio subjective testing, DBTs are worthless. Scholars themselves won't use the terms "factual" or "proof" only "indicates" or "seems to indicate". Hardly factual.

Get back to reality.

Where do you get this nonsense? You been reading the wrong stuff. Since you can measure it, please give us the data. The ones I have seen are at the 5th decimal place. Be my guest, claim you can hear that stuff.

Oh, the cap test, better be under DBT. The last one was null but hey, we are still waiting for all the positive ones.
DBT are only worthless to the less inforemd ones, as one would expect. Thanks for the info from fantasy land. LOL

[skeptic]

People who have something exotic, esoteric, or just plain different to sell that is expensive but can't demonstrate any sound electrical engineering proof of their claims of superiority through those measurements which invariably describe mathematically completely the faults in transferring or amplifiying electrical waveforms always come up with some off the wall gobbledegook hocus pocus like strand jumping, fermi velocity, DF, DA, and LaDeeDah, to explain the unexplainable or at least impress and confuse those who are untrained and don't know technobabble when they see it. And they are always right and the electrical engineers and mathematicians are always wrong. If capacitors were a bad way to decouple a loudspeaker from the dc bias of the output stage, the world could just as easily have stuck to transformers or have gone completely over to dc coupling. The plain fact is that not only are electrolytic capacitors cheaper than transformers for output decoupling, they beat them every which way there is. And not only that, but your loudspeakers have electrolytic capacitors in them as well, including in the crossover to the mid range where the human ear is MOST sensitive.

[Geoffcin]

I'm a SS guy. I've had SS equipment for over 25 years, From my days of the "big" Pioneer SX-1280 and EPI speakers (which I still have) to my current "big" PS Audio amp driving my 3.6 maggies, I've been happy with mostly all of it. I never really had a chance to play with tubes, or even much cared too. However, I just got back from a visit to the "in-laws" for Thanksgiving, and got a chance to use a very interesting piece of equipment. A 1964 vintage Top-of-the-line Sears console! Before you guys start laughing, Sears was just about the ONLY way you could buy Hi-fi stuff if you weren't in the major cities like NY or LA back then. @ $469 in 1964 money, this was one expensive item too. Sears gave you three years to pay it off! This puppy was in MINT condition, the wood lovingly oiled over the years, but unfortunately it had seen little service since 1979, the year of the loss of the owner. A quick check of everything showed it all works. I didn't have a tube tester (or even know where to find one) but I changed out the tubes to a set of new-in-box Sylvania tubes that were there. OK, put on some FM, and guess what..SOUND!
Sweet, euphonic, rolled off, easy to listen to all day, music! Got out the old Christmas records, changed out the "electro-voice" stylus (with diamond tip)! and we had sweet, euphonic, rolled off, easy to listen to all day, Christmas music! Anything below 100 or above ~5000 or so was out of it's range, but what it did, it did sweetly, and was very pleasant to listen too for many hrs. (the eggnog was flowing pretty freely too)! Now I'm sure that the THD was much higher than any SS gear that I've ever owned, but it sure didn't stop us from enjoying it. I've got a soft spot now in my heart for old equipment. I'm not going to toss my gear out and go get a vintage console, but I did have some fun with the old gear, and was not unimpressed with it's sound. Actually, it was quite good reproducing the female & male voice. One of the FM stations had a Beatles marathon going on, and it was good fun to imagine that we were back in 1965, transported back in sound by this vintage console. (did I say the eggnog was flowing pretty good)?

Cheers all!

[Mash]

AAAHHH,,,,,, Some heat. Some light. Some catfights.

First, have y'all noticed those double-underlined green nouns that are really imbedded ads? Roll your mouse over them and get an ad. Click on them and you probably go to a commercial website. Now I see the reason for this new format: MONEY!

[I edited this to respell a certain common term to be the 'word' Hye-Fye
because the correct version automatically adds an advertising link.]

I paid $500 for a NEW pair of mirror-matched mono-100 Futttermans, direct from Mr Futterman, when the rest of you were Ga-Ga over solid state in 1976. (I bought my Stereo-60 Futterman in 1974 for $300.) After 15 years of very substantial use my mono-100 Futtermans were retubed and updated to the self-biasing NYAL versions in 1991 for $400. The Mono-100's now cost me a grand total of $900. So tube amps are not expensive IF you did not wait until someone is spending big add dollars to dangle them under your nose! Timing is Everything.

Unless you have heard OTL's such as the various Futtermans and maybe the Fournier driving 8-ohm (and better yet, 16 ohm) Tympani, do not presume to say that "SS is better than tubies". Because the Futtermans driving Tympani combination will match live recitals of instruments and vocalists. Most speaker-amp combinations simply cannot.

BUT!
A Futterman driving KLH-9's sounded EXACTLY the same as a GAS amp driving KLH-9's which also sounded EXACTLY the same as an HK Citation 12 driving KLH-9's.

Note that:
Futterman = OTL Tubie
GAS amp = full push-pull Bongiorno SS design
HK Citation 12 = quasi-complimentary SS amp.

So.... it all depends on the speakers you are using!

Oh, when the above amp test was repeated on the Tympani, the results were
Futterman = Lifelike
GAS amp = Good smooth Hye-Fye Audiophile but not like the recitals.
HK Citation 12 = Full of metallic whiskers. Not pleasant to rub on your ears.

SS amps replaced tubie amps because there were a lot of bad tubie amps in the 1960's and earlier, and inexpensive SS simply sounded better to most consumers than inexpensive tubies. Audiophiles are quite willing to pursue the year's new holy grail, and prestiege manufacturers quickly found a deep well of SS-amp "improvements" to offer every year that would obsolete last years SS-amp products and put audiophiles on the trade-up treadmill. Every year, without fail, prestiege manufacturers would discover a "problem" with last years products which this years products managed to "solve". This is the basic trait of technology-driven products: whatever you buy will be obsoleted by next years offerings.

But if your rig can match live recitals, then you do not have to care, because the live recitals ain't gonna change!

[spacedeckman]

There are just as many, if not more $10K amps on the SS side.

General comment from me was that tube will always be more expensive to produce and, hence, buy since you need to include output transformers. Even you can't find anything wrong in that statement.

If the economies of scale for both SS and tubes were exactly the same, tubes would still be more expensive due to the output transformers.

Nothing controversial said or inferred.

Space

[Mash]

Spacedeckman

OTL tubies do NOT have output transformers, while some SS amps also did have output transformers.

NYAL bought the rights and patents for the Futterman amps in 1976. Julius was selling the Futterman mono-100 for $500, and he had a 1-year backlog that was strictly generated by word-of-mouth. NYAL made minor improvements to the Futterman mono-100 with Julius' guidance, and then NYAL hyped and sold the NYAL version for $3000.

So you see, the cost of parts has a rather modest influence on selling price. The costs of hype and advertising does drive selling price. The financial desires of the principals also drives selling price. But the cost of manufacture is a more modest influence on selling price.

[Geoffcin]

>>OTL tubies do NOT have output transformers, while some SS amps also did have output transformers.<<

Yes, this is one of the more interesting things about amp tech. Not all amps use the same topology. My SS amp has inputs for both direct coupled, and capactive coupled. I can tell you that at least with my amp, DC is the way it sounds best.

[skeptic]

NY Audio Labs exhibited at the 1983 AES convention at the NY Hilton and later gave a very interesting presentation to invited AES members at the WQXR auditorium in the NY Times Building. Their engineers discussed the death bed testimony they took from Julius Futterman and the voluminous technical papers they got from his widow. They made several significant improvements including an excellent solid state power supply and they designed a test rig that allowed them to adjust the critical bias controls in five minutes instead of the entire day it took Futterman with his setup. These struck me as among the best sounding amplifiers I have ever heard, certainly the equal of anything any other tube manufacturer produced although I would say that there are solid state amplifiers that sound just as good to me. BTW, their A/B comparison was McIntosh 3000s, the source was a master tape played on an Ampex studio console and the speakers were JBL bookshelf models which as I recall belonged to Harvey Rosenberg's daughter. Harvey was the founder and president of NYAL and someone told me recently that he had died. The ingenuity of this design is that it allows vacuum tubes to deliver power to loudspeakers directly without the need for a transformer. This is the major reason IMO for its superior sound, the lack of an output transformer, not that it is tubes.

[Mr Peabody]

Nothing brings out a firestorm of debate like tubes vs solid state, unless it's cd vs vinyl.

A couple observations from some of the posts.

When advising how much power one should buy, 35 watts may fill the room with sound but it takes power to reproduce bass. I don't want to open up another can of worms, I didn't say more power sounds better necessarily, it's just a fact that it takes power to reproduce ample bass. A 35 wpc rated amp may be able to do this as well, but then someone would have to admit that high current amps exist.

To those who think that newer is always better, I'd like to present as evidence the IC chip. This did nothing for amplification except make them cheaper to produce and sound quality to go down. The term "discrete circuitry" is not just a marketing term in my book. Manufacturers are not above "smoke & mirrors" to make a buck. Look at 7.1, is there actually any movies in 7.1? No, not to my knowledge. I'm just saying don't discard old technology without just cause.

It would stand to reason that closer tolerance parts would cost more and improve sound quality by using these parts, thus driving the cost of better amps up.

Manufacturers must know this debate rages on, why hasn't someone offered me an amp that has the slam and dynamics of a Krell along with the lushness and presence in the midrange of a good tube amp?

Those interested in capacitors may like to look at the large Dynaudio monoblocks they use for their listening tests. I have been told you can unplug them and they can run for another 24 hours off their capacitor banks. Sorry I do not have a link to offer.

[DMK]

[QUOTE=RGA]First of all be careful of those that claim Tubes are superior than SS. They can be but not always.

True. I've heard some poor tube amps. It's generally dangerous to make absolute claims. I even have some LP's that sound terrible so I can't say that LP's sound better than CD's ALL the time. But in my experience with many, many amps of both SS and tubes, the tubed products usually outperform their SS counterparts.

You mentioned the Sugden A21 which I've never heard. But the A21A is the finest solid state amp I've ever listened to. Interestingly, I didn't find it spectacular because it sounded like tubes. I found it so because it didn't do the things that SS does that make me cringe. I found no grain or etchiness, just smooth and lifelike music. If I were to buy an SS integrated amp, the Sugden would win, hands down.

SS has many more fans than tubes. I think they tend to fall into several categories - the ones who don't believe their own ears but only believe measurements, the ones with inefficient speakers, the ones who don't want to mess with biasing and changing tubes, the ones that haven't been exposed to tubed products, and the ones that have listened to tubed amps that exhibit all the poor characteristics that one reads about in the debates. It's true that some tube amps sound mushy, rolled off and distorted. The better ones don't unless they are trying to drive inefficient speakers. And efficient speakers tend to sound better anyway, IMHO so I'm in good shape using tubed amps.

[spacedeckman]

OTLs are cool, but have a bit of a limiting factor when it comes to speaker selection. Not exactly a good choice for the uneducated masses. I am NOT unfamiliar with the layout.

Output transformers on SS...Outside of some of the bigger Mac gear, I've never seen it, but again it really doesn't exist in reality.

To completely clarify my statement then..."The VAST majority of tube amplifiers use output iron, and the VAST MINORITY of SS designs do not. We cool now?

Space

[300A]

http://www.capacitors.com/picking_ca...rs/pickcap.htm

Picking Capacitors by Walter Jung and Dr. Richard Marsh from MIT.

Read the actual measurements for DA of electrolytic capacitors, the capacitance change vs temp, frequency etc.

DA factors of several percent for electrolytics, not what you seem to mislead below:

"The ones I have seen are at the 5th decimal place. Be my guest, claim you can hear that stuff"

5 decimal places refers to film types. Do you even know the difference between an electrolytic and polypropylene, crafts??

That roughly translates to distortion some 25db down.

1) Turntables have rumble factors of some 70db down and we hear that

2) "High distortion" tube amps, which you attack, have distortions only 25 - 30db down, and we can hear the sonic change, that by your own incinuation and attacks. If you can here it, then we can hear capacitor distortions, or are we playing games. But:

3) So we cannot hear -25db down? Here is what you stated:

"Oh, the cap test, better be under DBT. The last one was null but hey, we are still waiting for all the positive ones." (craft's quote)

So DBT tests show we can't hear 25db down distortions. Wow, that sure proves how accurate DBT tests are. And what is really embarrassing is you shot down your "own" DBT results (although no reference is given). You just keep shooting yourself in the foot.

Let me get this correct. So you are saying we can hear distortion from tube amps, but not from capacitors which have as much or more distortion than tube amps. And DBT tests show we cannot hear electrolytic capacitor distortions down only -25db.

I think you have been caught again not knowing what you are talking about.


Now Skeptic and his total lack of understanding electronics.

"People who have something exotic, esoteric, or just plain different to sell that is expensive but can't demonstrate any sound electrical engineering proof of their claims of superiority through those measurements which invariably describe mathematically completely the faults in transferring or amplifiying electrical waveforms always come up with some off the wall gobbledegook hocus pocus like strand jumping, fermi velocity, DF, DA, and LaDeeDah, to explain the unexplainable or at least impress and confuse those who are untrained and don't know technobabble when they see it."

Only problem with this are the three articles listed in the string AES, Eric Barbour, and Journal of Electrical Engineers are Mainstream engineering mags or people. By the way, Dr. Richard Marsh is one too, and teaches at MIT. So who is misleading whom Skeptic??

"And they are always right and the electrical engineers and mathematicians are always wrong."

See above Skeptic. Please don't give out bad information or information you made up.

"If capacitors were a bad way to decouple a loudspeaker from the dc bias of the output stage, the world could just as easily have stuck to transformers or have gone completely over to dc coupling."

A total lack of understanding of electronics. Output stages of SS amps are DC coupled to speakers because capacitors are so bad. Tubes can't because they have neither the current nor the low output Z unless one uses an OTL or cyclotron design. Electrolytic capacitors are worse than OPTs, unless the OPT is poorly designed.

"...but your loudspeakers have electrolytic capacitors in them as well, including in the crossover to the mid range where the human ear is MOST sensitive."

In good designs, polys are used, except in very low frequency crossovers. Only cheap designs (and cheap prices) use bipolar caps.

Enough education for today to crafts and skeptic. But it isn't good to mislead people when you have no idea of what you are talking about.

[Mash]

Hey, Skeptic

The fancy NYAL (Futterman) Mono-100's that had the "excellent solid state power supply" I believe were the ones with TWO chassis per channel, and they were priced at $9000 per pair. A wee bit more that $500 per pair, would you say? Would you be willing to spend 15 minutes a month to bias your amps if you could save $8500?
Let's see:
$8500/(3 hrs/yr x 15 years) = $189/Hour
Naahhh...too low for you.

But I believe this is bogus: Pure Harvey-jive:
....they designed a test rig that allowed them to adjust the critical bias controls in five minutes instead of the entire day it took Futterman with his setup."

I knew Julius, and spent a little time with Julius in his lab. So let me fill you in:

1. Julius could complete a soldered joint, start-to-finish, in less time than it would take you to pick up the iron and point it in the right direction.
2. I could adjust the bias of my Futtermans in 15 minutes, and Julius was a LOT faster than I was. A LOT faster. So I doubt it ever took an entire day for him to complete any amp-building or amp-adjusting task. He simply built too many amps to be that slow. Remember, 5000 people showed up for his memorial dinner.

[mtrycraft]

A 1964 vintage Top-of-the-line Sears console! Before you guys start laughing, Sears was just about the ONLY way you could buy Hi-fi stuff if you weren't in the major cities like NY or LA back then. @ $469 in 1964 money, this was one expensive item too. Sears gave you three years to pay it off! This puppy was in MINT condition, the wood lovingly oiled over the years, but unfortunately it had seen little service since 1979, the year of the loss of the owner. A quick check of everything showed it all works. I didn't have a tube tester (or even know where to find one) but I changed out the tubes to a set of new-in-box Sylvania tubes that were there. OK, put on some FM, and guess what..SOUND!
Sweet, euphonic, rolled off, easy to listen to all day, music! Got out the old Christmas records, changed out the "electro-voice" stylus (with diamond tip)! and we had sweet, euphonic, rolled off, easy to listen to all day, Christmas music! Anything below 100 or above ~5000 or so was out of it's range, but what it did, it did sweetly, and was very pleasant to listen too for many hrs. (the eggnog was flowing pretty freely too)! Now I'm sure that the THD was much higher than any SS gear that I've ever owned, but it sure didn't stop us from enjoying it. I've got a soft spot now in my heart for old equipment. I'm not going to toss my gear out and go get a vintage console, but I did have some fun with the old gear, and was not unimpressed with it's sound. Actually, it was quite good reproducing the female & male voice. One of the FM stations had a Beatles marathon going on, and it was good fun to imagine that we were back in 1965, transported back in sound by this vintage console. (did I say the eggnog was flowing pretty good)?

Cheers all!

Nothing wrong with enjoyin the old, nothing at all

[mtrycraft]

Correct, my number as some SET goes well above this. Expensive Xformer. It certainly not the parts.

There are just as many, if not more $10K amps on the SS side.

General comment from me was that tube will always be more expensive to produce and, hence, buy since you need to include output transformers. Even you can't find anything wrong in that statement.

If the economies of scale for both SS and tubes were exactly the same, tubes would still be more expensive due to the output transformers.

Nothing controversial said or inferred.

Space

Nothing wrong with the statement. Yes, you did indicate the output transformes. That is what I commented on. Very expensive it seems that those output xformes increase the prise so much for a no nothing amp, a SET.

Nothing controversial, just a comment on th eexpense of the xforemers as it is nothing to make them and it seems all the tubes need them, so there must be a volume production someplace, no.

[Norm Strong]

To those who think that newer is always better, I'd like to present as evidence the IC chip. This did nothing for amplification except make them cheaper to produce and sound quality to go down. The term "discrete circuitry" is not just a marketing term in my book. Manufacturers are not above "smoke & mirrors" to make a buck. Look at 7.1, is there actually any movies in 7.1? No, not to my knowledge. I'm just saying don't discard old technology without just cause.

ICs cheaper to produce? You bet. Sound quality goes down? Nope. Sound quality goes up.

[RGA]

DMK:

Ihave never heard the original A21 because the owners probably still own and operate them

The new, if it can be called new, A21a is the same design and arguably a very similar sound I should think but it is 25 watts over 10. Newer technology has allowed Sugden to use parts that can handle much more heat hence upping that class A power.

In the blind listening level matched panel of reviewers this amplifier was selected with ease over the others. In the What Hi Fi shootout it lost to a Roksan but the reviewers said that on a pure sound quality level it was easily the best of the lot but because it has no remote and is only 25 watts and runs very hot and has minimal features they could not select it.

Plus all the lousy designed inneficient speakers require a 100 watts to just to resemble a bass line. Pathetic.

People can yak on all they want about tests, about watts, about power, the merits of whether SS amps sound different blah blah blah

Here is the facts. That Sugden is relatively ugly, it's not particularly expensive as high end goes, it has little to no extravagant features, it has a balance knob which is a bit of a no-no to many audiophiles, it's finned heatsinks run sideways which is counter to the considered proper design of vertical. Very low watts. Did I mention it's pretty ugly.

Ohh and it isn't advertised at all. Sugden spends zero money advertising. Fans of the site have started that website. Dealers spend money advertising it now and again.

They don't change the amp basicall since 1968...the current A21a is identical to the model in 1989. Still sounds great, built like a truck and still sells.

Why does it sell? Because it sounds good. With their looks, and the watt figure - it HAS TO SOUND GOOD.

I wished I had found it on the used market. The A48b is very nice - it had sold for 20+ years going from a48 then to a48 mki and Mkii and to A48b. It started in the 70s and stopped in 1997. It has a valve sound but has more power than the A21a reaching out to about 65 watts, is not high current (which means it's not going to like a 2 ohm load) in fact running a 2 ohm speaker will pop my amp's fuse(thank heaven it has a fuse). Nor is it pure class A. The A25b and A28b are the other older notables.

Interestingly John Marks of Stereophile recently said in a discussion on the AA forum that the A21a is the class leader for sound for the price.

[skeptic]

To completely clarify my statement then..."The VAST majority of tube amplifiers use output iron, and the VAST MINORITY of SS designs do not.

That is correct. The point is that the ss amp designers could have used them had they wanted to. Amplifier users had always been accustomed to seeing them on their equipment and paying for them. The designers rejected output transformers in favor of capacitors not just because they were cheaper but because they sound better. And with the arrival of completely DC coupled amplifiers in 1967, even the capacitor was a design option.

[300A]

That is correct. The point is that the ss amp designers could have used them had they wanted to. Amplifier users had always been accustomed to seeing them on their equipment and paying for them. The designers rejected output transformers in favor of capacitors not just because they were cheaper but because they sound better. And with the arrival of completely DC coupled amplifiers in 1967, even the capacitor was a design option.

Some people just refuse to learn. No SS amps use capacitor outputs, and if they did, they sure would NOT use electrolytics.
And SS doesn't need output transformers. Your making no sense.

Tubes can't use capacitor outputs unless in an OTL or Cyclotron designs. The current capabilities are too low and the output Z is too high. And if one uses a cap on the output of an OTL, it is for disaster protection, not because of the sonics. And even then Polys would be the choice, not electrolytics.

And even different brand polys sound different.

Get a grip on yourself Skeptic and at least try to learn. Ignorance is not to be celebrated.

[skeptic]

Some people just refuse to learn. No SS amps use capacitor outputs, and if they did, they sure would NOT use electrolytics.
And SS doesn't need output transformers. Your making no sense.

Ignorance is not to be celebrated.

I am not celebrating your ignorance, believe me.

How do you think solid state amplifiers keep 70.7 volts DC from getting into loudspeakers and destroying them? How many have you taken apart. How many have you built? How many have you studied. Apparantly none of them. I suggest you stop writing and start reading. Maybe eventually you will learn something. Unless a solid state amplifier has a dc coupled output stage, it needs a large dc blocking capacitor which is invariably a POLARIZED ELECTROLYTIC CAPACITOR. The sole exceptions that I know of are the early McIntosh units.

[bturk667]

VTL makes tube amps with that much power?
How about 100 wpc?
How about 200 wpc?

[300A]

I am not celebrating your ignorance, believe me.

How do you think solid state amplifiers keep 70.7 volts DC from getting into loudspeakers and destroying them? How many have you taken apart. How many have you built? How many have you studied. Apparantly none of them. I suggest you stop writing and start reading. Maybe eventually you will learn something. Unless a solid state amplifier has a dc coupled output stage, it needs a large dc blocking capacitor which is invariably a POLARIZED ELECTROLYTIC CAPACITOR. The sole exceptions that I know of are the early McIntosh units.

You have got to be kidding. Name some brands that use caps on the output. I want to read those high quality brands.

Only lowfi would have 70 volts DC on the output and use caps; like for schools, intercom systems etc. Any halfway good audiophile piece would use complimentary circuitry and DC couple out.

Are you using one of those amps, with the polarized electrolytic caps on the output for your listening??

Lowfi would obviously use caps to save money as sonic quality is not very importance. They certainly wouldn't use OPTs.

Get back to reality, man.

[skeptic]

VTL makes tube amps with that much power?
How about 100 wpc?
How about 200 wpc?

I was once of the opinion that you couldn't have too much power. That was the mantra. That is still the conventional thinking. I no longer believe it. IMO, once you have enough power to drive your speakers as loud as they will ever have to play without clipping in the room they are installed in, that is enough. More is not merely overkill, it is bad engineering. There is usually a price to pay, a tradeoff between one virtue and another, even if it is just cost. But if excessive power availability comes at the price of increased distortion, greater noise, less reliability, then it's a trade I would not care to make. As I said, tube amplifiers can be built to hundreds or even thousands of watts. However, most manufacturers of tube amplifiers generally restrict their most powerful units to about 100 wpc or so, maybe slightly higher. This one is an exception. I think McIntosh offers some fairly large ones too.

[bturk667]

I agree! I have an amp that will produce a 100 wpc into 8 ohms. This is more than enough power for my speakers in my room. There a few variables that one must take into account: Room size, speaker sensitivity, music one listens to, and how loud you like to listen to your music. In most cases less IS more. More power = more money! Less power = less money! I have always felt current is more important than wattage.