Mosfet amps A true compromise betw. tubes and SS?

Personally I'll take a mosfet design over bipolar or glassware any & every day: I just love the mosfet sound & everytime that I try out something else I've always eventually gone back to mosfet's. I've gone through a lot of equipment over the years, but mosfet has always turned out to be my common demoninator. You get the typical bass control & high speed transient response of solid state with some of the warmth of a tube based design, but without the heat inefficiency, microphonics, noise, & unreliability of tubes.

I will totaly agree with Bob Bundus. Bipolar amps sound dull in comparison to Mosfet amps .Mosfets characteristics give high thermal stability and very high output current and voltage with reliable operation. Power Mosfets are sonically superior to the Bipolar transister, but have the sweeter qualities found in tube equipment.

I agree with Bob bundus, as well. Good mosfet amplifiers do NOT sound like tube amps. I use mosfet amps in both my HT system and my 2-channel system and would not find them satisfactory if they sounded like tubes. I've tried a number of tube amps from the cheep to the way expensive and none of them gave me the clarity, precision, speed, dynamics, and detail that I get from good SS gear.

That being said, I'm first and foremost a musician and only secondarily an audiophile. My objective is to hear the music with as little sonic degradation as I can manage. The warm, euphonious distortion introduced by tubes is seductive but ultimately--for me--it gets in the way of the music.

Different strokes and all that.

will

will

Hi Will

I would be interested in your list of good tube amps that fall short of ss in the areas of clarity, speed and dynamics and even detail, my you have me curious. You might want to hear a good OTL design with a proper load to put that assumption to further test. This aside from your preference of ss over the warm, even ordered distortion characteristics of tube circuits. btw, the Atmas-pheres have among the fastest slew rates of any amp, period.

I am a big fan of the Counterpoint hybrids amps from the 80's. Mike Elliott truly got the best out of those designs other than their tendency towards premature failure (mosfets). The SA-100 was the best 1K amp that I can recall in its day.

Yes Tubegroover, I too was a big fan of the old Counterpoint sound, with their tube/mosfet hybrid amp design. Tried some other mosfet-output SS amps in recent years like Gamut, Belles, Pass. I think the mosfet amps really do give a certain "dimensionality" to the music, and a palpable midrange. Most recently I discovered the Llano Design Trinity amps (small-signal tubes for voltage gain stage, mosfets for output current stage). To me this is the best-sounding design so far. They are fast, clean, and reliable amps (and no mosfet mist!). Plus, not nearly as expensive as Lamm!