For anyone who moved from tubes to solid state — a question

Take something like the Benchmark AHB2 noise and distortion is below audibly of humans

Yes- what is happening here is that this amp has enough feedback to sort things out. This value tends to be north of about 35dB. By 'sort things out' I mean that the feedback value is so high that it can compensate for the distortion caused by the application of the feedback (which is what causes brightness in many solid state amps going back 50 years); its an impressive accomplishment.

What did I give up? Distortion.

Distortion is what causes solid state amps to be bright and harsh.

I'm hoping for folks to compare:

well matched amplification and speaker -- with TUBES
vs.
well matched amplification and speaker -- with SOLID STATE

If other factors are responsible for a sonic difference, then I do not have an answer to my question.

This is always tricky! The problem is that many speakers these days are low impedance, a big difference from how it was when tubes were king.

But transistor amps make more distortion into low impedances than they do into higher impedances, and in high end audio the idea is (usually) all about getting the system to sound as real as possible; to that end low impedance speakers really don't have a place in high end audio.


But quite often people compare tubes to transistors on low impedance speakers. Its not an even playing field- if you really want to know what the differences are all about, an 8 ohm speaker (and one that is not 4 ohms in the bass) is how you would do that comparison. My speakers are 16 ohms and I've yet to hear a solid state amp that can play bass as well; if you are playing Sound Labs or Quads you'll probably find the same on them as well (even though a lot of people use solid state on those speakers).


The reason tube amps are still around all these decades on is that they make less audible distortion than transistor amps- the brightness of solid state is caused by distortion (and is as much a coloration as anything tubes do); this is why a solid state amp and a tube amp can measure flat on the test bench but the solid state amp will sound bright and the tube amp will not.

In my experience it’s all about matching the amp and speakers.

^^ This!
If your speaker is of reasonable impedance in the bass (8 ohms or higher) then its no worries making bass. Some tube amps (like SETs) do have trouble making bass impact due to phase shift in the lower octave. But if the amp has the bandwidth to prevent that then bass impact is no worries.

Many solid state amps actually overdamp the loudspeaker, as amplifier technology in terms of acting as a voltage source has far outstripped loudspeaker technology in this regard- no speaker ever made needs more than 20:1 damping factor, yet there have been solid state amps with damping factors of 1000:1. Overdamped speakers tend to have a coloration often called 'tight bass'; no such thing seems to exist in real life. But audiophiles often point to tight bass as a good thing, even though its pretty obvious its an artifact and not neutral.