Once you go 300b it’s hard to go back?

In my case my Leben CS-300 bettered SAC 300B PP and Yamamoto 2A3 amp. Also I prefer it over First Watt F5 clones power amps I already own.

@gsm18439 cool I live near Vu too and have a preamp and pushpull amp both designed by Pavel.  EL34 but I've borrowed his pushpull 45 amp before and loved it.

I’ve had several 2a3 and 300b amps, went through entire low power amp - high sensitivity speaker journey. Then I started building digital amps, tpa3116, IRS2092, now tpa3255 - never looked back. Most of my stereo equipment is hand built.
I’m a professional musician - violinist, making my living playing music, also have EE degree...

Hi Jond,

Personally for my taste if I ever went the SET route again, it's been some years, I would go for either the 2A3 or 45 tube over the 300B. Both to me are a touch more incisive and transparent though also lower power.

I used to be of the same opinion.  The thing about directly heated triodes is that you're basically hearing the driver tube, and the higher the power rating of the output tube, the more difficult it is to drive.  This is one reason for there being so many mediocre sounding 845 and GM70 amps.

The whole "Direct Heating" (Sakuma) movement in Japan was based on paying attention to the driver circuit, and they drove their high power triodes with output tubes ... sometimes, even pentodes!

The first prototype of our NiWatt amplifier had that typical lush but slow 300B sound.  As we paid more and more attention to the power supplies (4 of them per channel) in order to free up the driver circuit from the output tube's demands, the amp began to take on a "45 on steroids" characteristic - quick, delicate, articulate while harmonically rich but with power to spare.

Back in the'90's, this lush presentation worked for a lot of us because many high efficiency speaker systems could be a bit on the "rude" sounding side.  Now that we're seeing more and more refined high efficiency speaker systems, we don't "need" these colorations to serve as a tone control.  Some may like it, and that's ok too ;-)

Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier Design

Folks must realize most class 'D' amps are single ended amps as the analog signal is 'formed' across an inductor/capacitor pair just like a triode plate/cathode. All the gobbly-gook ahead of the passive pair is ultrasonic basically. No wonder class D sounds good if well implemented.

But here's the truth, if ya luv the glow and the sound, just stay in nirvana baby! Happiness is happiness!

If you feel the itch to wander well than maybe it's time to listen on man. But don't sweat it dude! It's all GOOD!