Current amp vs Voltage amp

Charles1dad, I'm not an engineer, but try to be a pragmatist. I also stayed at a Holiday Inn last night. LOL :>')

I think others have made the point that amp and speaker designers have to make trade-offs to achieve a certain result at a certain price point. I appreciate that there are a number of "tube friendly" speakers on the market (I am aware of at least 3 or 4 off the top of my head), but I suspect that most are not. Consequently, I surmise that most speaker designers assume that their gear will be driven by high output SS gear and if compromises have to be made, it could be impedance and phase angle attributes.

So maybe the real issue is that while tube amps possess certain sonic attributes that SS amps can only hope to mimic, perhaps if something has to "give," tube amp manufacturers will have to figure out a way to make their products able to do double duty and handle speakers that are designed and voiced to be driven by SS amps. Ralph and Al have made a point that such amps are heavy and costly. Perhaps that will be the design challenge of tube amp manufacturers if they want to compete in the present and future marketplace.

In the meantime, I have tweaked and configured my gear whereby I am better able to enjoy the music without experiencing listener fatigue. I don't know how flat the FRs of my S8s are, but the output is musical. I'm standing down for now with respect to switching out gear. Next time, I'll be a little smarter when putting gear together. We all live and learn.

Does it truly demand that much more high level engineering expertise to build flatter impedance speakers with better phase angles?

i personally think 'yes'. Empirically, we can all get this info by merely looking at the offerings in the marketplace. How many of the available speakers afford the user the use of a wide range of amplifiers with minimal hit in sonic performance? Each one of these speaker manuf claims to be highly qualified. Are they?

If that's the case then those who are capable of doing this deserve more respect and recognition for their achievement.

indeed they do! they really do as they have 'got' it. These particular speaker manuf rarely toot their own horn as a result they get forgotten & taken over by those who have eye-candy for speakers. IMO.

Attempting to make tube amps more compatible to drive certain speakers could potentially result in a loss of their instrinsic "sonic attributes".

This is a great discussion about the factors that go into good sound from a technical perspective.

Speaker/amp matching is perhaps the most important fundamental to get right first to achieve best results IMHO. Every system must have an amp and speakers and other things might help compensate but cannot replace a good amp/speaker match.

I am in the camp that says the happy path is to get the fundamentals right from a technical perspective first and tweak from there. Nothing is more fundamental than making sure the amp is up to the task of GETTING THE MOST out of the speakers.

ALso, shame on the high end audio industry for not making it easier for buyers to get the most out of these products. It would not be hard to come up with a quantitative system for the benefit of buyers to identify quality of amp/speaker matches. But the reality is its up to the buyer to be educated enough to make these decisions. Good luck! I suppose such a system would take a lot of the mystique out of high end audio, for better or for worse. I guess if it were beneficial to the vendors to do something like that, they would.