Too many tubed components in the system?

~~~~Too Tubey or Not Too Tubey, Is That The Question?

Jest The Facts

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Ok, a part from some silly answers above (good to know there are some senses of humour out there), it would appear that the consensus is that there is no sonic degradation of sound quality with having tubes in each link of the audio chain. Good to know. Retubing costs are another issue, as might be locating one bad tube when there are so many in the entire chain. Albert Porter --> what techniques do you use to isolate and find a "bad" tube when you've got so many in so many components?

Personally, I am on the other side of the fence. I do believe that too many tubes is a problem. Have I heard all tube systems that sounded reasonably good? Yes. But most sounded even better once one or two components were replaced with SS.

In many cases, it depends on your listening preferences. I have friends with all tube systems that I think sound really, really bad (bloated mids, poorly controlled bass, etc.) that they just love. It also depends on the speakers. Some speakers just require much more juice than most tube amps can deliver. If you fall in that catagory, a neutral 200W+ SS amp mated with a tube pre-amp brings out the best in both.

Julian

Actually, I think it depends on the design and implementation. You can have a lot of tubes in a well designed set up and suffer little sound degradation, but the opposite can be true as well.

Having fifty pairs of Salma Hayek's tubes in a row is a very good thing. If it were 50 Ellen Degeneres' tubes, I'd definitely go with solid state.