Tubes? Transistors? Which are better?

A TUBE AMP WITH INFINITELY HIGH DAMPING FACTOR?? If that's possible, I'D LOVE TO HEAR IT. Let me borrow yours a while, why don't ya??

If D'Agostino said to jump into an empty swimming pool, would ya? IT IS THE CABLES, so get over yourself. You're just biased against Krell, and don't have the guts to admit it, dude... Dan has been wrong before about cabling, and we all forgive him ahead of time for any gaafs he makes (procaliming that "two channel is dead", etc.)!! He does well enough to have a company that makes superior amps without needing to decide what cable is best with them anyway. I CAN HEAR BETTER THAN YOU AND ALL YOUR BUDDIES THAT DON'T LIKE SOLID STATE!!! The only tube amps I've heard that actually made music, SOUNDED ALMOST INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM SOLID STATE ANYWAY...

Do you have a Wolcott amp?

If your tube amp brings you the most pleasure, then that's great. I'm sure if I heard your system, I'd probably think it's a good match for the rest of your components/room, perhaps. BUT YOU STILL ARE TOTALLY WRONG ABOUT KRELL, and if you heard my system you'd realize it. IT'S ALL IN THE SETUP. As for who can hear better than who...I can hear a 20 kHz sinewave from a test CD (and the artifacts that must accompany it from that limited medium), referenced to a 1 kHz signwave when it is at about 79 dB at the sweet spot (because my SPL meter's mic isn't accurate at the frequency extremes). I can also hear a CRT TV's 15.6 kHz sweep from the other end of my house. ALL I'M SAYING IS, just like all tube amps don't sound alike, neither do all solid state ones. PERHAPS THE KRELL YOU HAD WASN'T FUNCTIONING PROPERLY, or was a "lemon"...

To Audionut: The right cables fix the problem of "details being too forward". To "Uliver": You have to decide for yourself. Which is better, MAKING YOUR OWN DECISIONS, or doing what others do FOR THE SAKE OF FOLLOWING THE HEARD? Or doing what your dealer says, because "he wouldn't possibly steer me wrong...and he just happens to have what he thinks I need in the store, so we'd be helping each other out..." heh heh heh...

Output impedance isn't theory at all. It perfectly describes the power amp's ability to control the cone motion of a dynamic speaker, which is what I was talking about. I suspect I would like the sound of your system, Redkiwi, but it's possible I could improve on it...Not to diminish the time you spent evaluating, but I forget, do you use room treatments?

I feel as many (most?) reviewers do: That tube amps emphasizing even order harmonics (that are "consonant" with the music) doesn't BEGIN to explain the positive aspects of a tube amp...BECAUSE most all tube amplifiers DON'T JUST have higher even order harmonic distortion; they have MORE of BOTH ODD AND EVEN order harmonic distortion (than do ss amps, usually). And no, TRANSISTORS DON'T SWITCH (completely) ON AND OFF, and don't do it at all in a class A circuit. Any class AB circuit's output devices will switch on/off to some degree, WHETHER IT'S TUBE OR SOLID STATE. One should not dismiss ALL solid state amps until one has heard them all in one's system. I think the flaws with solid state (when they exist) have more to do with what a higher (than a tube amp's) slewing rate does when it's not controlled well enough. IT OVERSHOOTS THE SIGNAL, etching a false "glare"/"grain" onto the resulting waveform. This is evident when a square wave test is done, when you can see obvious overshoot. Most tube amps round off the corners of a square wave, lending a more "rounded" quality to the music. ALSO, all these guys touting the Sony SCD-1 need to realize that it doesn't even have a discrete output stage...it has op-amps!!! My CD50 has HUGE BIPOLAR OUTPUT DEVICES THAT RUN IN CLASS A, so it can easily mop up the floor with an SCD-1 when playing CD's "only"...besides the fact that it doesn't need a linestage, and that it's output stage is "beefier" than many stand alone linestage's outputs...

I guess I'm too "careful" to even try to answer such convoluted questions.