HIFI Advices please read

That is meaningless, erroneous and in every respect misleading. If you prefer PF to Britney then you can say you say you like them better, but you cannot say they are better by any countable units of betterness. You cannot say that valve amplifier is twice as good as a transistor amplifier, that is nonsense. However, you can say you prefer valve amplifiers or you like them better - that is personal preference and nothing that you can empirically quantify to justify to another audiophile, hi-fi freak or anyone who is just mildly interested in audio equipment. It's like when you use "musical" as an adjective - what do you actually mean by that? If a set of interconnects or an amp is more "musical" in the mids and highs what does that mean exactly, in terms that everyone here can understand? Does that mean that if I play something discordant and dissonant like Faust or Stockhausen it will now sound more lyrical and melodic like Barclay James Harvest? No- of course it doesn't. So what does it mean?

 

All these descriptions of personal feelings or choice, kinda feels like I am reading a customer review, which is fine, but oliver you quote a lot of different manufactures of amps, tube/valve, HP amps.....Have you actually owned all these different name brands or are you a hi-fi equipment seller, distributor? I just wonder cause I have never heard a tube amp in person nor met anyone who had one, so I only have what I read to go by.

I hope to one day hear one in action.....I doubt I will buy one as they are sold thru 2-step online stores and I don't fancy paying US$5,000.00 for a tube amp.

 

What Dean describes to me in several posts makes sense to seriously look at non valve amps......a glowing glass bottle is pretty but will I really hear the difference between a US$3,000 amp by Jolida and a US$1,000 amp by NAD?

 

My search continues....Thanks gentleman!

This is getting pointless and silly. If you use cardinal numbers as a measure of something then you have quantified it - if you say a Class A valve amplifier is two or four times better than a Class A transistor amplifier then you have placed quantified measures on that. Empiric means "by observation or experiment" as opposed to "by calculation or theory" - using theory you can predict the gain and bandwidth of the class A amplifier, with extremely careful modelling you could predict other factors about it - or you can empirically measure them. No matter how well to calculate or predict something, you can only prove it with empirical measurement. Goodness is not an empirical measurment.

 

The information you are talking about cannot be measured or predicted - they are feelings, perceptions and preferances, and those cannot be quantified. You cannot say a valve amplifier is two times better than, or twice as good as, a transistor amplifier, it is complete nonsense.

 

MOSFETS (Metal Oxide Silicon Field Effect Transistor) and Bipolar Transistor are not the same, and while both are called "solid-state" it is unfair to tar both with the same brush.

 

MOSFETS work in a similar way to valves and have very similar transfer characteristics, (the relationship from input signal to output signal) - on the negative side what MOSFETS don't have is an nice glass bottle and a nice glowing heater, but on the plus side they don't need a nasty 400V high-tension supply or nasty matching transformers to drive a speaker.

See, you did't consider that in his threads, Oliver get's to decide what's polemic.