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

I do love to romanticize about a sweet 300B, 2A3, or 845 amp, and I keep saying I'll end up with one.....but we'll see. I love my Aric Audio "Push Pull" EL34 amp, and will die with it.

For years I've have a Bob Latino Tubes4hifi ST-120 amp that can run in "triode" or "ultralinear" mode. It's a $2,000 amp including tubes, and I just don't give it enough credit; it's a little brilliant amp. It responds really really well to tube rolling too.

Virtually all the amplifiers on the market are based on a push-pull symmetry model. The push-pull symmetry topology has no particular basis in nature.

Vacuum tubes and transistors don't either. This is a red herring.

I don't normally disagree with Nelson, but in this case I do. 

If physics is a part of nature, then we have an access to see that indeed, push pull does have a basis in nature. Two men with a large saw can cut down trees a lot faster than a single person can. You can see that analogies can be used in ways to make any argument you want 

We've been selling OTLs for the last 49 years. They have one stage of gain so are simpler than an SET which might have 3 gain stages including the output. 

So you can see there are a lot of ways to twist the simplicity argument around too. 

The bottom line is regardless of the amplifier class of operation or topology, the result must be musical, so that amplifier will have a very good first Watt as well as the succeeding Watts. 

But, with proper speakers and a quality build, SET amps deliver a very "pure" sound that can be quite seductive.  While bass tends to be not as tight and punchy as that of a good pushpull amp, the bass has its own positive attributes--it has natural and subtle differences of tone while pushpull bass is much tighter and punchy at the cost of sounding a touch "mechanical" (sameness).  I have no disagreement with someone finding the balance of attributes favoring SET amps.

I can't describe better my experience with SET and push-pull amps. I personally prefer a natural bass of a SET than a push pull punchy bass. My set amplifier has a very high distortion (THD) but it sounds clearer than my push-pull and solid state amplifiers with much less THD. The comment made by Ralph somehow explains this phenomenon. 

So if you listen mainly listen to (an amplified) rock or electronic music, push-pull would be fine. But if you want to fully enjoy an acoustic music, you will do that better with a set amplifier.

It surprises me that the THD is still a major parameter for measuring the sound quality. It is quite irrelevant to the quality of the sound as we perceive it. Even the formula by which it is calculated doesn't look relevant. I guess the engineers were unable to develop  a more adequate parameter for measuring the sound quality so far. I suggest this is the only reason why THD still remains a standard.