Tubes? Transistors? Which are better?

I do use room treatments Carl, but one of my rooms (I run two systems) is problemmatic and hard to deal with (the main problems being squareness 24'*26', and hard floor). But with the narrow vertical dispersion of Martin-Logans I get very good results sitting about 9 feet away in this room. By the way, I was not referring to your comments on output impedence in my earlier post, but to the seemingly generally accepted wisdom of tube pre with ss amp. My fault for dropping into the conversation out of context. I switched from ss to tube power amps for a simple reason. When I went to live concerts I was always struck by a kind of beauty in mid-range instruments (particularly voices), that did not seem to be present in my recordings. When I heard my current tube amps - I recognised the beauty right away - and knew it to be real, and not a coloration. The fact that the amps gave me better bass than the ss amps was an unexpected bonus. The problem of course is that I may never know whether the same thing might have been achieved by the change of some other component.

As long as all of us are touting our favorite poison here, I must confess, I am a tube guy all the way. One main reason that tubes sound more musical is that they don't "switch" on and off like transistors do, and when tube designs produce distortion (ALL amps have distortion) the tubes do it in "even" order harmonics, just like music does. Transistors do distortion in "odd" order and also contribute IM distortion in the process. This can sound like detail, but I find is stressful and distracting, and less convincing than the presentation of tubes.

Try Jeff Rowland with Michael Green Designs Chameleon loudspeakers,Albert.Tell me later if it is not convincing.

I have heard Jeff Rowland's amps, and for transistors they are one of the three best I have ever heard. The others being Griphon from Sweden, and FM Acoustics from Switzerland. I still prefer tubes, for the same reason I stated before. It after all, is a matter of choice, and I certainly understand why you like what you do.

I feel as many (most?) reviewers do: That tube amps emphasizing even order harmonics (that are "consonant" with the music) doesn't BEGIN to explain the positive aspects of a tube amp...BECAUSE most all tube amplifiers DON'T JUST have higher even order harmonic distortion; they have MORE of BOTH ODD AND EVEN order harmonic distortion (than do ss amps, usually). And no, TRANSISTORS DON'T SWITCH (completely) ON AND OFF, and don't do it at all in a class A circuit. Any class AB circuit's output devices will switch on/off to some degree, WHETHER IT'S TUBE OR SOLID STATE. One should not dismiss ALL solid state amps until one has heard them all in one's system. I think the flaws with solid state (when they exist) have more to do with what a higher (than a tube amp's) slewing rate does when it's not controlled well enough. IT OVERSHOOTS THE SIGNAL, etching a false "glare"/"grain" onto the resulting waveform. This is evident when a square wave test is done, when you can see obvious overshoot. Most tube amps round off the corners of a square wave, lending a more "rounded" quality to the music. ALSO, all these guys touting the Sony SCD-1 need to realize that it doesn't even have a discrete output stage...it has op-amps!!! My CD50 has HUGE BIPOLAR OUTPUT DEVICES THAT RUN IN CLASS A, so it can easily mop up the floor with an SCD-1 when playing CD's "only"...besides the fact that it doesn't need a linestage, and that it's output stage is "beefier" than many stand alone linestage's outputs...