Tube Power vs Solid State Power


I continually hear Tube power is more powerful than Solid State Power. IE; “A 20 watt tube amp’s power is like a 60 watt Solid State Amp’s Power” and so on… Is this true ???

I always think of the “What’s Heavier, a pound of Feathers or pound of Rocks story?” A pound is a pound right ? 
Maybe someone could offer some thoughts and explain if this is true or not. 
Thanks
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Showing 1 response by panzrwagn

A watt is a watt except when it's not. The interaction with a power source and a resistor is pretty predictable. A speaker is not a resistor. It is a complex impedance with resistive, capacitive, and inductive values that vary with frequency and level. Worse, a dynamic speaker is also an electrical generator creating significant back EMF that the amplifier has to deal with, both in terms of dissipation and fedding back into the feedback loop of the amp. If you doubt me, hook a voltmeter up to a woofer and press it back and forth. 

How various amps and amp designs deal with all this is the magic and the art part of amp design. And why different amps do indeed sound different, from each other, and on different speakers. Isolating a big high sensitivity speaker from the amp with a transformer, as most tube and McIntosh amps do gives the designer a known constant load to optimize the design to, and is why most successful Klipsch, big Altec, and JBL systems are tube based. They isolate the amp from the back EMF and complex impedances, but there's no free lunch there, either. Mismatch loads and the frequency response suffers.