Can tube preamps be as 'detailed' sounding as ss?

Atmasphere: Most tubes go into "soft clipping" ( rounded edges ) because they don't have the necessary speed / bandwidth to reproduce the sharp edges that make up a heavily clipped sine wave aka a square wave. Then again, i'm not telling you anything that you don't already know, so this is really for everyone else reading this thread : )

Other than that, i've always been a proponent of having "MEGA" overhead in system capacity. I learned a LONG time ago that it is not sheer spl's that make things sound "loud" and / or "aggressive", but distortion. By using high powered amps that are never pushed, and speakers that aren't easily driven into compression, one can listen at astonishingly high spl's with little to no fatigue. Not only that, but it doesn't sound nearly as loud as it really is. That's because the system is free of distortion, which is what adds the apparent volume that brings both fatigue and ear strain with it.

As far as Muralman's comments go, most good quality switching amps can sound quite clean even when spl's are roaring. This has to do with their reduced duty cycle, which minimizes thermal stress. When it comes to SS amps, the faster that you can dissipate heat, the better off you are. Both sonically and in terms of product lifespan. Sean
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Thanks Atmasphere. I can well believe that it's a murky business trying to discern volume differences using pure sine waves, and also that incipient high-order distortion can cause listener fatigue. But I always regard at arm's length claims which seem to equate A) music signals with sine waves, or B) amp behavior below clipping with amp behavior around clipping (particularly when it comes to preamps, which shouldn't even get anywhere near approaching clipping).

Speaking of preamp distortion, the new Stereophile has THD measurements from JA on the Mac C1000 (figs. 5-6 and 9-10), which for practical purposes seem to indicate all but indistinguishable (not to mention negligible) distortion behavior between the unit's tubed and solid-state options, at least within the limits of the test conditions.

Atmasphere...But, if a tramsistor power amplifier has well designed clip limiting, it will, when overdriven, produce a waveform that looks just like a tube amplifier.

Sean, tubes *are* as fast as transistors, else vacuum-tube radio circuits could not exist. There are many things that limit bandwidth in tube *designs*, but tubes are not the culprit (check out the risetimes on our website sometime). Soft clipping is caused by space charge effects (a cloud of electrons that occurs near the plate of the tube) which is a phenomena of a tube near saturation. It has nothing to do with bandwidth.

Eldartford, there are transistor amps now that have a 'soft clipping' feature, but clipping distortion is a gross manifestation of the effects that I am referring to. Unfortunately these 'soft clipping' amps still retain the transistor/odd-ordered harmonic signature that the ear detects so easily. This is my own opinion, but I feel this issue of higher/odd ordered harmonics is one of the more important issues that seperates the subjectivists from the objectivists.

Atmasphere, A pox on all foreign harmonics, for they are all a type of signal pollution. I can hear tube coloration as easily as solid state irritation.