Tube Watts vs. Solid State Watts - Any credence?

Thanks Bombaywalla. I really enjoyed reading the 1983 Atkinson and Messenger interview of Mr. Johnson. It was like taking a trip back in time.

IMO, since that time, ARC has made many significant refinements to their technology that have taken its product line many level beyond where ARC was holding back in 1983.

Wish I could say I understood the patent app stuff ... but I didn't. I'm not a EE.

I think Mr. Johnson wisely commented that trying to judge the quality of an amp by throwing around cold stats like slew rate, phase angle shift, bandwidth, and so forth is a fool's errand. It made perfect sense to me when he said many technical factors are taken into consideration when designing an amp that sounds good. To even think that a perfect amp can be viewed as "gain on a wire" is an absurdity.

Thanks again.

well some of them isn't most of them. it's nature of tubes and output transformers. they're weak when impedance of speaker goes down on low frequencies.

Some actually think that only tubes can make the bass sound right. Or at the vey least something like Lamm hybrids.
This is probably a slight exaggeration and a matter of taste and speaker choice, but I can see a strong point.

Tim deParavicini (EAR) has said that he can tell what an amp's bass will sound like by looking at the power transformer. For bass, the larger the better. Unfortunately, the larger it is, the worse it is (all else being equal) at high frequencies. An amp designer has to balance the two against each other and find the best compromise.

Yes, a watt is a watt, but, the way most tube manufacturers measure their gear, a tube watt is, arguably, LESS than a solid state watt because tube manufacturers typically spec the output at a much higher allowed distortion level.

BUT, measurements notwithstanding, I actually have heard many demonstrations where a low-powered tube amp is perceived to sound louder than a much higher powered solid state amp. In such demonstrations, neither amp was pushed to obvious clipping. At modest or low sound levels, I think that many solid state amps sound dead and lifeless. To get them to sound livelier, one tends to push the volume. When heard side by side at the same volume, one is often struck by how much better a well designed tube amp sounds compared to a comparable solid state amp, and because so many audiophiles conflate sound characteristics down to some simple measurement, like power and distortion, they concluded that the better sounding amp is more powerful.