Which SS amp does sound the most warm of all?



I'm looking for a warm sounding SS amp. The one with the most tubie sound of all.

Now my choise endend by three SS amps,

or the:

Pass Labs Aleph 1.2
Jeff Rowland 8T
Mcintosh MC 1000

These amp are only to drive the high/mids of my speakers system. I love the 3D effect, holografic sound,sound stage, the placement and the finest detail.

Any other advice is welkome. Please help me out.

Thank for the feedback

Alex
texas25

Showing 2 responses by tubegroover

How about a clear and resolving tube amp that offers this

warm
definitely not dark
PRAT in spades
articulate, well defined and low bass (2hz at full power into an 8 ohm load)
power that belies its 70 watt rating
no glare, grit or grain in the upper frequencies
long tube life
reliability
exceptional value (if price correlates to performance)

Look at the Berning zh270 as an alternative to what you might expect from great ss and tubes combined. An amp that uses tubes but is not a tube amp in any conventional sense.

"I love the 3D effect, holografic sound,sound stage, the placement and the finest detail."

It doesn't get much better if it gets better at all than the Berning with proper system matching and providing it is within the power requirements of your speaker system. There are few speakers it can't drive.
Thanks Artar for your trust in my opinions. What I try to convey in my opinions is a frame of reference to my experiences and nothing more. There are many superb products out there but the real juggling act in this hobby, as any experienced audiophile well knows, is finding the synergy and balance it takes to make a system come alive and breathe life into the music, not an easy task and quite time consuming.

No, I have no experience with the VTL MB-450 amplifier and low impedance loads and how it might work with a dip in the upper midrange. The charactistics of the transformer, the power of the amp and the speaker itself may not predict accurately how it would convey the music, only listening would. I couldn't even predict the tonal changes the Berning might affect on the sound and I know this amp quite well and have heard on several speakers none lower than 4 ohms at any point. 2 ohm loads and tube amps don't lend themselves to those kind of predictions, unfortunately.

What I will say is that the Berning by its design has overcome many of the limitations of transformer and OTL tube amps in many ways with the added virtue of retaining the best virtues of the latter, no small feat. The power of the zh270 is hard to fathom until you hear it. It doesn't break up or compress but of course it is not going to convey the same degree of power as a large high powered transformer coupled tube or OTL amp for that matter. What it will do is take longer to rear its ugly head if it has one. To date I haven't seen it. If a 10 lb 70 watt OTL tube amp can run Sound Labs M1 speakers without compressing or presenting any nasties, there is something intrinsically right about the design. I can't even imagine what this design might do with double the power. I expect it could drive just about anything with aplomb. With the Ascents, an audition would be mandatory before knowing if it has enough power suitable for that application.