What do Oil Caps do and how do they effect sound?


Being new to tubes I would like to know what Oil Caps do and how it changes the quality of sound. How does it work?

Also, on the amplifcation side of things why does Solid State have higher wattage than tubes?
c019740
Correction in order here bomby:

"845 tube. This is a radio broadcasting type tube & the grid is biased at 1500V! "

No, sorry - not correct. max PLATE voltage on 845 is 1250v, and ASL doesnt' run them that hard. They would not bias the grid higher than the plate(!) and infact the grid is going to have about 70-80v of negative voltage applied, to run them in class A1.

And let's stop talking about 'rail' voltage w.r.t. tube amps - it's called B+. Rails apply to sand amps.

Eldartford makes a good point I was going to mention - B+ on tube amp is somewhat irrelavent in any case, since it's almost always going to go out through an OT, which has a massive step down ratio. (5000 : 8 or more)

The only situation which B+ would be used to drive speakers directly would be a high voltage transmitting tube output connected directly to the panel of an electrostatic loudspeaker. There were a few commercial attempts at this I think, none sold today that I know of. It's an idea which has a lot of merit but unfortunately is rather difficult to implement well, or at all. There are some more worthwhile and successful attempts being made by the DIY tube crowd, but that doesnt' apply to commercially available designs. Most of the time you would need a bigger tube that even 845 to do it as a SET amp (the only way it would be worth doing), meaning either a tube like a 212 or 849 or maybe 250/450TL, or else a more modern planar triode ala Eimac or Svet ceramic types possibly. (talking 1500-3500+v on the plate of those tubes)

-Ed
Thanks for all the wonderful response. It was a pleasure to read them all. This will definitely help me understand my new Cary tube preamp and also help me when deciding on a new amp and weather to go SS or Tube when the time comes.
Thanks for the correction Ed_sawyer. My bad for quoting the dealer without double-checking the info he gave me.
Brooks1,

The sound was exemplary, if I may say so!
The sound was very transparent, plenty of high freq. & low freq extension & since I was listening to single-driver speakers (Cain & Cain Single BEN & Carolina Audio JTM) the sound was so very coherent i.e. music had very good timing! With the ASL SETs, the midrange was additionally magical.

If you have the inclination, I did write a lengthy report on my ASL/single-driver experience. It's long, so have been warned! :-)
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?cspkr&1072830036&read&keyw&zzsingle=driver=speakers