An Amplifier Change for my Wilson Sophia 2's?

Would it make sense to replace the tubes, assuming that the ones installed are no longer capable of peak performance? Just a thought. 100 tube watts should be enough for these speakers.

So clearly there are a lot of viewpoints on this subject!  That is to be expected as I am learning that speaker - amplifier matching seems to be one of the black arts.  Thank you all for your posts.

To sum up, some say speakers need loads of wattage to get control, tight bass, and better imaging.  some say even hungry speakers do fine with lower wattage tube amps.

I spoke to Wilson Audio and their man that I spoke to said that the speakers do indeed react well to lots of wattage.

There are two issues I am raising here.  One, I feel I am raising my volume control too high to get where I want to be, and this is a gain issue.  The 2nd is the question of wattage and control, and what to feed my Sophia 2's so they deliver their best work.

One suggestion was the preamp (phono or one stage) was not giving enough gain.  If I followed that route and get a preamp that has more gain, such as the ARC LS26 with 24db of gain, compared to 18db of gain in my LS-25, that would solve only one of the issues, and I would not know if the extra power amp wattage will be adding a lot of improvement with the Wilsons.  (side note, I checked the specs on all of the ARC REF line stages from the Ref 1 to the Ref 10, and all have super low gain.  Much less than my LS-25!  If I were to pony up for a Ref 3 at some point, I don't think I would have enough gain to drive the speakers to the volume I like at all!  Seems odd to me.  Perhaps if one wants a Ref series line stage, one needs a particularly high gain amplifier, but I digress).

For my budget ($2200), I am leaning towards the Bryston 4BSST at the moment.  23db or 29db of gain (selectable), 500 watts in 4 Ohms, this has the right price point, solid warranty, 6db increase in gain, and 5 times the wattage.  (Al, it also has 20K load impedance that you warned about for matching to the LS-25.)

Today I am going to read up on how amplifiers work, so I can better appreciate Al's comments, which are a bit over my head!  Time to study.

check  bryston 7 bst or 7 bsst in the second hand market. phenomenal value and double the power. ( make sure of voltage ). most of them are still under warranty ( 20 years ) . a friend is using with McIntosh tube preamp with great results. another good option is quad QMP monoblocs.

I was looking at the 7bst and 7bsst.  Only trouble is that the 7bst will only give 23db of gain in a balanced output, and the newer 7bsst model is out of budget.. For those reasons i am thinking that the 4bsst is the right way to go.

There are substantial differences in the sound of the various
iterations of Bryston amps and you should try to get the SST2
series if you can......
even if you got a 3b, you’d have 250w into 4ohms which
would better the ARC and you should be able to get that around 2K
used.....the 4b doubles those numbers and there’s one on gon for 2900, that you should be able to get for 2500.........so you shouldn’t have to go back 3 models in series iterations to get in your price range......you should be able to get 500w plus into 4ohms and stay where you need to be with a later edition of the bryston’s with the Torus transformers etc......I ran 7bsst2’s with my very current hungry Magnepans and I now have the 28bsst2’s with those same speakers........It’s not about power.....it’s about headroom and overall control. Are your speakers controlling your amp or vice versa ?