the best 'tubey amp - warm,smooth,liquid' ?

Congrats zen, two mental defectives are better than one.

Neither of you will be advancing to the lightning round.

Audiofall..lightning round?..boy, do you have child issues. I gave up baby competitions at the age of four and had no further use for my sandbox. If you want to let go of your childhood skeletons and get rid of your sandbox, I would recommend putting it up for sale on Ebay, or better yet, install four outdoor cube speakers on the four posts and list it on Audiogon.

CJ no clarity...can we start over? No wonder this thread has run off the rails.

Zabiaud, Welcome to AudioGon and your first posting here. In answering your question disagreements have arisen that may be of some value to you or not. In any event it has nothing to do with you personally.

Regarding your 4 ohm speakers. In my earlier post I suggested a tube amplifier and offered some of my personal observations with them. I'd like to offer a bit more detail.

My speakers are 87dB / 4 ohm yet they dip down to 3.6 ohms. I was powering them with a powerful 200 watt solid state amplifier as well as a 375 watt switching amplifiers. The solid state amplifier would begin to sound congested when turned up and the switching amplifiers had no problem other than the difference in their presentation.

The Carver tube amplifiers can be run at high volume without any audible issues that I can hear. They're highs sparkle, the mids have depth and weight with solid mid bass and surprisingly powerful deep bass. They come with a switch that changes the amount of feedback which gives you a modern or vintage tube amplifier sound. They also have that relaxed feel that only tube amplifiers offer.

I suggested these because they are the first tube amps that were not excessively large, hot, and expensive. More importantly to me, they are able to comfortably drive my 4 ohm speakers while sounding much better than the other amplifiers I was using.

My personal experience with tube amplification is limited to Marantz 8B's and an MFA D75. Neither of which could drive my 4 ohm speakers beyond background music levels. I hope this has been of some help.

Whatever you decide on I hope you will return and share your experience.

Vic

I had a 360 w/ch Carver m4.0t SS Tube Transfer Function amp for many years.

This was one of Carver's efforts to "voice" a SS amp to sound like a tube amp and was reasonably successful at that.

A corollary to that was that although it went plenty loud and clear, and did well with my speakers that were relatively tube friendly at the time (Magnepan, Triangle), it was also not able to deliver balanced sound top to bottom with my other less tube friendly speakers (B&W, Dynaudio, OHM) despite also going plenty loud.

FWIW.