Tubes?

tube watts can sound louder than ss watts due to the overload distortion characteristics of tubes being more rounded and ear-friendly than transistors' hard clipping which sounds more ragged

either way you really don't want any amp, tube or ss, to regularly go into clipping if you want consistently good SQ

hopefully the op can sort through another typical a-gon thread, lots of pretty good advice, some heavy handedness in how it is delivered, some getting caught up with semantics and missing the point

i suggest op take away the following:

1 - you have definitely chosen pretty inefficient, relatively hard to drive speakers - if you like them and will run with them, you will need to match your amplifier carefully, most likely a beefy solid state unit to deliver alot of power/current to do the job well esp. if you like to play pretty loud

2 - most tube amps will struggle with driving your speakers, in absolute volume and in bass control -- tube amps just can’t match ss equivalents in bass control and slam, you need to go to megabuck tube amps to get very good bass with your speakers

3 - tube pre feeding ss power amp likely the best solution if you want some tube dimensionality and sweetness to the sound, that is IF you value that

4 - tube watts vs ss watts and the semantics associated with that line of discussion is pretty much irrelevant

@oldhyvmec

’life is short, make sure spend as much time as possible arguing with strangers on the internet’

just trying to reward good behavior here, discourage bad

but do i really care? no, not really - just would be nice to have folks be nice while helping other nice folks

with covid, fires, horrible state of the nation, we hang out here more than we should, so it’d be nice if we could have a nice place here

@tomic601 

much wisdom in your posts about transformers and lost detail earlier in the chain

we shd all remember that when we obsess over gear