To that end I would like very much for either/both to cite some tube amps that are as fast as any ss amps they've heard so far. Imo, you can't get there without serious speed in an amp.
One way to measure speed is rise time, the voltage you can reach in a given amount of time (one microsecond). This is a test that is done with square waves as an input. How does 600V/usec sound? That is faster than most transistor amplifiers, but in this case we are talking about a tube amp.
With rise time there is also usually bandwidth as well. We get full power to about 200KHz and only down about 2 db at 300KHz- this with no feedback. The bandwidth is cut off above that- the output section has bandwidth to about 60MHz or so... Once I used modified version of the amp as a booster amplifier for a CB radio transmitter, years ago, just to prove that we could do it.
So yes, they are fast.
I have never tried tube amps and I am fearful that I would miss some SLAM and Impact of the presentation. Does your system belt it out pretty loud and non fatiguing?
When I put transistor amps in my system I find myself turning up the volume in order to try to get some slam out of the amp. They just don't have it compared to the (usually) much lower powered (tube) amps that I normally run. But keep in mind these amps do have full power right down to 2 Hz.
Its funny, I've heard for years that OTLs are supposed to be wimpy amps, but in practice I find that to be more true of transistor amps, by quite a stretch, at least as far as bass is concerned. That was part of the reason I began investigating what the implications of the amp/speaker interface was really all about. I'm old enough that I remember older audio products from the 50s and 60s, and I have collected texts from the old days too. I noticed that these days things are not done the way they did them in those older textbooks, but it was not because the books were so old the math was wrong. It was because of that Paradigm thing I've been harping on. Quite literally the Voltage Paradigm has its own set of charged terms- 'output impedance' is a good example, meaning something entirely different from what it means in most fields of electronic endeavor. The result is a whole lot of confusion, but we audiophiles are quite used to it (because this has been going on for decades) and so our solution is to take it home and listen to it, regardless of what preferences we might have.
That, IMO, is not very efficient, but until the industry talks openly about these paradigms or models, whatever you want to call them, that's the way its going to be.
