Over the last 30 years I’ve gone back and forth with tube and SS gear multiple times. VAC, Belles, McCormack, Modwright, Emotive, Pass, many others, and now LTA. The motivation for change was driven by the feeling of incompleteness, never reliability.
I owned an LS100. A nice unit, but a little noisy. Healthy tubes are not inherently noisy. It’s either the circuit or worn out tubes. My LTA pre uses 6sn7’s. Dead quiet. Blackest blacks. Choice comes down to personal preferences and budget.
Much of mid priced tube gear is colored or compromised at the frequency extremes, and much of similar priced SS gear is lifeless because it doesn’t breathe dynamically and is compromised by transitional odd order distortions which our ears are very sensitive to. Tube watts sound bigger because the higher distortions are the friendlier even order type so 2% THD isn’t too offending. .5% THD from an SS amp can sound very irritating.
To me the LTA gear sounds complete. Resolved, extended, and clean. That doesn’t mean sterile. Not at all. Sterile sounding gear, usually inexpensive utilizing high global feedback, might be the most unsatisfying of all. The unique David Berning design doesn’t sound like anything else I’ve heard. The best of both tube and SS sound at a reasonable price. My Ultralinear replaced a Pass XA30.8, which is a damn good amplifier. But the UL was just superior in the lower midrange while retaining excellent bass definition and dynamics. And the tubes are cheap and should last 10 years because they aren’t biased to the moon. Tube amps with a conventional output transformer tend to smear the sound with hysteresis, which is a lag in reaction to change of signal. This may actually sound pleasant, but it is not accurate, and ultimately unsatisfying. Atma-Sphere amps are also OTL and I’d like to try them sometime.
However, 20 watts is only 20 watts. Not a problem for my Daedalus speakers which are 96 dB sensitive. Many speakers aren’t anywhere near this sensitive despite their printed specifications. So choose wisely. The amp to speaker interaction may be the most important in the audio chain so it is best to consider them as a matched system, especially with tube amps. At my core I’m a tube guy because I can live with their sins more easily. At the highest levels the compromises are few, or maybe just fewer.
