60 watt Rogue Tubes for Vandersteen 3A Signatures

03-14-10: Narrod
Tvad, OK. I'm just sharing my experience with the speakers and lots of different amps. That's what I heard.

Narrod, from your experience with the speakers, what amps sounded best and what amps didn't work as well.

Can you be specific about models and power specs?

Thanks.

The specs seem to differ a bit from the measurements:

http://www.stereophile.com/floorloudspeakers/128/index6.html

From the Vandersteen 3A Signature website:

RECOMMENDED AMPLIFICATION
100 to 200 watts per channel into 8 ohms.
The amplifier must be stable into a 4 ohm load.

If the manufacturer recommends a minimum of 100wpc, then I'd give that serious consideration.

Agreed! It's been my experience that the old audiophile axiom that one should double the recommended minimum power, holds true much more often than not.

Unsound - power specs for amps are developed under static conditions. Music, however, is dynamic and that is where the difference between SS and tubes becomes evident. In my experience, tube amps deliver more dynamic power and hence sound more powerful in practical music listening than SS at comparable static power specs. This has been a consistent observation over many years and many different ss and tubed amps. Of course there are MANY factors that affect the resulting sound (like power supply, distortion profile of ss vs. tubes, etc) but for sheer dynamic power, tubes seem better to me.