Thought on OTL tube amps

Almost all of the OTL amps I heard had an incredibly appealing immediacy and liveliness that solid state never has and most tube amps also also lack. That comes with a bit of a touch of roughness with certain recordings (particularly classical music). Several models I heard also seemed to have a bit more tube noise than other kinds of tube amps that might be an issue with extremely efficient speakers (a friend sold an M30 because of noise with 107 db efficient speakers. I thought that was a mistake).

A really good SET amp can also have similar kind of liveliness and immediacy. But, low powered SETs are much more limited in the models of speakers they can be matched. Although OTLs are expensive because of the amount of wiring needed for the multiple tubes, really good SETS can be even more expensive because they demand a top quality output transformer. For the vast majority of applications, I like OTLs.

Personally, I run 99 db/w speakers with a parallel 2a3 SET (two output tubes per channel), but, I don't play my system that loud.

If the Berning folks might be stretching it a bit to call their amp an OTL, what about companies, like Tenor (I believe), that put out a solid state amp that they described as OTL?  This was absolutely true, but, aside from a few solid state amps like models produced by McIntosh, all solid state amps are OTLs (low output impedance of transistors makes transformers unnecessary).

By the way, all of my amps are FCL (flux-capacitor-less).