tube watts vs solid state watts

It seems to me that there are low, or lower, watt tube amps paired with speakers that one generally would never dream of doing with the same watt ss amp.

Watts is watts! But since you can drive most tube amps well past clipping (into serious distortion) without hurting your speakers, many tube users routinely clip their amps to high distortion levels to get a little extra volume.

If you do that with a solid-state amp, the odd-order harmonic distortion will grate on your ears, and you'll likely burn out your speaker's tweeters. This is why solid-state users prefer to use amps with more than enough power to get the job done, while tube users take advantage of the tube's soft clipping nature and many times use an amp that is way underpowered to drive their speakers. I guess they don't mind/notice the compression, and they welcome the extra fuzziness of the distortion.

And I don't know of any tube amps that have 3 to 6dB of headroom. Actually, not too many amps of any type have that much headroom.

My tube amp goes to "11"!!!

Marco

marco,i shudder to think what the 11" reference is about.

Of all the amps I've owned tube and solid state, multiple of each, I've yet to hear that a tube amp sounds louder than solid state. I've concluded that if you like your music dynamic like in real life, it takes some power to do that.