Thank you clearthinker for your welcome! I agree with your perception, equipment matching is the essence of a good system. Essentially, any amplifier topology or speakers design can bring us to musical bliss when every element is in perfect synergy. That takes long experimentation, decades of trying combinations out, and ultimately sheer luck on stumbling onto it. After much experimentation we know more, and can hit synergy more often. I do not hold any technology superior to any other, each have their own compromises, and cater for different experience.
In my audio journey my experience is that the major cost element is the time and work I put in it. If you are willing to build the cabinets and crossover, then high efficiency can be built for 6K$ or less. (Sure, a comparable commercial design would be around 35-60K$, but then there’s no need for 10,000 hours invested into R&D.) So, compared to even meager speakers costing today at 10K$, and SOTA around 250K$+, I think that cost is not an issue anymore to high efficiency for a dedicated serious DIYer, who had serious mentors and experience.
To audio2design: I respect where you are coming from, and all of us have different sets of experiences. Thus, I will refrain from holding my experience base superior to yours, and I am open to new experiences. I have heard and seen enough not to pass judgment blindly, and to find treasures at corners where I would never suspect them. That’s the point of this thread, to open our minds to new possibilities. When I wrote about the low level listening with SE, I wanted to convey that it can reproduce music when played at soft level, while complex big amps fall into anemia (crap out) when played at the same soft volume. The SE amp with the H.eff speakers can play distortion free up to 100dB/m levels. While my SE amp has super low, less than 1W output into the 16R H.eff speakers, the output transformers are rated at 25W, and the power supply is build to deliver enough for 300W output. Most SE amps fail at rating the PS and the OPT close to the output level, (and fail even more miserably at supplying a well filtered quiet B+) and thus operate close to transformer saturation, starved PSU and lack of low level detail. When built right, the 1W amp sounds as dynamic and strong and distortion free as an absolutely massive amp would sound. Indeed, you are right, most of what I said depends on implementation. Actually, everything depends on implementation, so I’m glad we can agree. There’s no single immutable point, everything is just a generalization, as basically not a single parameter is kept constant for all equipment installations. I was trying to rack my brains to come up with the difference between H.eff and L.eff that would be a constant. I could think of two aspects, which I found immutable regardless of setup conditions. One is that with H.eff the concept of volume becomes obsolete: adding volume gives the feel of greater dynamic range, but I do not get the impression that the average sound volume is getting significantly louder. It’s the dynamic range that expands. Still, this can depend on the system, and if preamp is not up to spec, you might have different experience. My second observation is more versatile: H.eff allows you access to EVERY record. Labels and pressings one would never think as capable of providing music experience become playable and at shockingly good quality. Not as good as a perfect recording, but they allow you to ENJOY them, and they will sound much better than you ever heard them on any system, while on L.eff they are intolerable.
Getting back to the amp issue: laws of physics dictate that even if we had a perfect way to amplify signals, then the amplification to 1000W introduces x1000 times more entropic distortion than amplification to 1W, and there is no mechanism to get back that loss. As technologies are imperfect, the actual distortions with increasing power are even greater. My experience showed me that tube amps have a much, much greater potential to present microdynamics, harmonic and spatial content. Not the 100+W ones, the small ones. The higher the power the more the intricacies fall apart, and a big fat 200W tube amp just becomes a wannabee solid state amp.
To me, SS amps sound inhuman, with extremely few exceptions. Sure, lots of power and control, but lack of harmonic riches and low level detail. I agree, they sound as perfect PA amps, and that’s king when one is going for the ultimate amplified sound. My comparison is to live, unamplified classical instruments. Tubes do a much better job for me to portray the message that the acoustical instruments portray.
I understand that systems preferences ultimately boil down to our listening habits, subjective preferences, and how far we came on our audio journey. Thus, such debates will never come to a closure. I hope that everyone find his and her source of joy.