Would You Rather Own A Good SET Amp, Or A Great Push Pull Amp?

@sns  - thank you so much for your thorough and detailed reply : ) - you have raised important issues there to consider. If I may ask further - have you encountered any particular typology or signal chain to speaker that is not biased to either a forward or recessed presentation but is neutral as a general characteristic?

In friendship - kevin

SETs need high efficiency speakers and ideally subwoofers to support them. Compared to PP, which offer balanced operation, in my experience SETs major benefit is a better rendition of attack and decay.They subjectively have a faster attack (particularly noticeable on the reeds in oboes and clarinets and more organic reverb (best heard on good piano recordings).While @atmasphere is firmly advocating balanced connection I have so far been unable to replicate this SET advantage in a balanced setup. Even with highest efficiency horn speakers, headbangers listening to amplified instruments should stick to PP since in most instances the above SET benefits have been obviated by the PP amplifiers used when recording.

Having been around this crazy hobby for 40 years+ I have yet to find a better amp for listening to classical and jazz than Nobu Shishido’s Wavac EC300B with Takatsuki tubes.

Please continue to comment as a number of you have raised some very interesting points about the strengths of types of speakers. 

Meanwhile, I am still heartbroken about losing the amp, and by minutes. Something almost certainly never recoverable from. Eight years of effort, and hope, lost all at once. 

But I am learning things from the alternate discussion, which is never a bad thing. 

It is regrettable that the one you really wanted got away.  But, there are a lot of fish in the sea, and perhaps you will find something tat you will really like if you continue to do what you are doing which is to search for alternatives.  Absent more information, it is hard to make specific recommendations, but, I have some general observations.  First, I tend to like low-powered tube amps, whether SET or pushpull.   SET amps tend to be much simpler in design, which leads a lot of people to assume that they are cheaper to build.  Indeed, there are a lot of low-cost Chinese-built SET amps on the market.  But, SET amps require the air-gapped transformer that Atmasphere described above and good ones tend to be quite expensive, so a good SET amp is usually quite expensive.

I particularly tend to not like the sound of high-powered pushpull amps that use a lot of output tubes of the like of KT88, KT120 and KT150 tubes.  The sound is, to me anyway, "brittle" (hard and edgy).  I much prefer lower-powered pentode and tetrode tubes in pushpull amps utilizing only two tubes per channel.  My favorite types are 6L6, KT66 and EL84.  The EL84 is apparently a very easy to work with tube because there are MANY examples of low cost, good sounding amps utilizing that tube.  Low-powered triode tubes are also very good in pushpull configuration although they still should only be used with very efficient speakers.  I had a wonderful sounding 45 pushpull amp that put out about 4 watts per channel.  My current 349 pushpull amp puts out about 5 watts.

Meanwhile, I am still heartbroken about losing the amp, and by minutes. Something almost certainly never recoverable from. Eight years of effort, and hope, lost all at once. 

Well, if it’s any consolation, I usually find that when I’ve placed a certain product up on the proverbial pedestal for a long time, I typically end up disappointed when/if I finally experience said product. I bet there was a strong chance you would’ve found fault with those amps in short order. 
 

I’ve still yet to encounter an audiophile system that sounded “perfect,” to my ears, regardless of price. This leads me to suspect there is no real “perfect” component out there either. Tube amps are especially imperfect IME. All of them have some rather significant shortcoming, whether it be noise, distortion level, lack of headroom, dynamics, detail etc… Same can be said for good solid state, but to a lesser extent IME. 

You might be better off with a class A solid state amp like the Pass XA25 or one of the wide heatsink Codas (5.5, 12, 16 etc). These amps do nearly everything better than much of what’s out there in tube form.