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The Best Tube Amplifiers vs Spectron ?

Before I bought Spectron stereo amp for my Watt/Puppy 8 I used McIntosh 2202, excellent tube amp and one of the best I ever owned. However, Spectron was better or even much better in all respects, most interesting - harmonic richness of midrange closely approximated the real music. The key is that this amp need very long time to fully break-in.

Today, I have read the latest Spectron's review (see http://spectronaudio.com/reviews.htm) where reviewer preferred Spectrons over state-of-the-art $50k VTL Siegfrieds!!! Amazingly, he wrote "The Musician III Mk II monoblocks have a crystalline purity in the reproduction of every voice and instrument that sounds more to me like the essence of live, unamplified music -- which I attend, on average, more than once a week year-round -- than any other amplifiers -- at any cost, based on any technology-- that I have ever heard."

I must agree with him (plus with Spectron you have no output tube maintenance, no heat, no huge weight) and I wonder if others have similar experience.

Mike.
michael_moskowich

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emailists
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It's quite interesting that several posters have found a SS (class D no less) that seems to stand up with some of the top designs. I have heard the Sigfreids on several occasions and found them to be excellent.

But looking over StereoMojo's review, James Darby provides some insight into why one may want to choose this amp, and why in some circumstances, another may be a better choice.

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FACT A: If you have speakers that are legitimately very efficient with high sensitivity (those specs are dodgy as well), you do not need these amps. Or probably even one of them. Examples are single-horn types or full-range models like those by Coincident which have good sensitivity and benign, amp friendly impendence curves.

FACT B: If you have 100 or 200 wpc amp (specs are tricky here, too!) driving rather inefficient speakers with impendence curves that range all over the place and you listen at moderately loud to loud levels to music other than harpsichord solos in a largish room, you are probably listening to large amount of distortion and/or clipping.
The size of the speaker does not matter. Some small speakers (like Brit monitors) are notoriously hard to drive.
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