Tube v. SS

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Superman541

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Which sounds better? ((((JUST KIDDING!!!!))))

I am likely buying a pair of Dahlquist DQ-10s tomorrow morning. I think they will sound good with my SS 70 wpc amp. I think they will even sound good with my 15 wpc EL-84 tube receiver. However, many people say these speakers need 150+ wpc to....ahem...."open them up." but....

...some also say they sound very good with tube gear. Okay, here is my question: Since tube gear very rarely provides 150+ wpc power, I assume they are saying that speakers like these DQ-10s (or any other good speaker for that matter) need EITHER a good tube amp (30-40-75 wpc) -OR- a quite powerful SS amp (150 - 200+ wpc).

Am I on the right track here? I am a musician, and I happen to have a STRONG preference for tube gear. My 100W heads routinely CRUSH 500W SS heads. My 300W head is a monster. Tube power, objectively, is not greater than SS power. But in battlefield conditions, 30+ tube watts seems to be rarely lacking in clarity or volume. I think that speakers which need lots of power....are fine with double-digit tube watts. Would you agree?

Or, alternatively, is someone suggesting that DQ-10s need the tube power of at least 3 high-current 6550s per side? That sounds ridiculous.
 
Get a 1 MEGAWATT Tube Power and never look back! In SS realm, that equates to about 10 MEGAWATT Sand Power!

Either one usually works for the DQ-10.

On a side note, Watts are Watts and why would anyone thinks SS Watts are less of a Watt than a Tube's Watt?

What is a 100W heads?
 
Why not just wait until you have the speakers in your possession and then judge for yourself? I hooked them up to several amplifiers, tube and SS. They had a real nice sound out of a Scott tube integrated but it lacked any oomph so it's more suited for background level listening. A few mid watt (under 100 watts) receivers were less musical but able to play louder. Ultimately it was a 200 watt /channel Yamaha amplifier that made those suckers sing the best.
 
EveAnna "Vanimal" Manley and her Manley Labs may be able to help.

http://www.manley.com/products/view/n250

neo250cu34465.jpg

https://www.stereophile.com/tubepoweramps/670/index.html
 
I've heard DQ-10's on low-ish tube power and they're workable. I heard a pair run from a McIntosh 225 and it managed just fine. Not going to blow the windows out but if you aren't heavy on the volume control its fine. If you can get them 50 a side I think you'll be very OK. I don't think a dozen watt EL84 amp is going to swing it though.
 
I agree with Gadget. Get yourself a robust tube amp(s), monoblocs would be the best, 6550/KT88 or KT120 based. That will give you some headroom you need.
 
I would aim for the 50-60 watt area, I haven't heard it but I've been told they sound very good with that (like a Citation II?). I grew up with a pair driven by a Bryston SS amp at 275/ch, and though loud it was certainly possible to clip the amp. They like power.
 
Watts are Watts and why would anyone thinks SS Watts are less of a Watt than a Tube's Watt?

Technically they are the same, but they sound different when loud.

What is a 100W heads?

I have some 100W tube amps ("heads") that sit on one or more speaker cabinets.

Ha! Now that I think about it, some of those amps have the "Power Amp In" feature. So....I could use them as monoblocks. 100+ watts per side. Interesting......

Gadget, Price, Dave....good comments. Thank you.
 
Yes! Unless you don't have $26000 for a pair... then no.
Manley mono's are priced as a pair, so new ones would only be $13,200 for the pair.

But you can get them for much less on the used market. When you can find them.

I do agree that tube watts sound louder than sand watts. Whether that's due to under/over rating, some special sauce in the output, or whatever, I don't know. From an absolute sense I do agree that a watt is a watt though.

Tubes are weird, man. If you can get over 60 watts in a tube amp, you can probably drive most speakers reasonably well IMO.
 
Speaking from experience. I ran my DQ10s with a 38 wpc Onix SP3. They sounded fine!

Most times I ran them with an Adcom GFA555II. They sounded fine!

Yes, the additional power from the Adcom helped, in mostly subtle ways. Given what I owned my preference was to drive them with SS. The guy I bought them from, however, was running them with Macs mono blocks. I forget the model but I think they were around 70 watts a side. My DQ10s never sounded better than the day I bought them.
 
Manley mono's are priced as a pair, so new ones would only be $13,200 for the pair.

.

I've always thought that the ultimate system would have to include triple digit tube power. While 13k is still fantasy territory, I like the industrial look they have.
 
I've always thought that the ultimate system would have to include triple digit tube power. While 13k is still fantasy territory, I like the industrial look they have.
They're very cool. I'll probably be buried with mine.
 
Never heard the Dqs with anything. If its a tough load (wide impedance swings, low impedance at certain frequencies) skip the tube approach. Obviously no one size fits all thing here.
If the money is laying around find a MC3500. Otherwise no reason to force the issue. I have tried to fit the round peg in the square hole at times. Some stuff just works well together. Other, not so much.
 
But -- but -- what about metal tubes?!?
No sand in those!

They actually do have glass internally. Pull the bottom off, you'll see the leads coming through a glass seal.

I have something that gets right to the edge of triple digits. My modified Bogen MO-100a's will do a solid honest 95 watts each. The MO-200a redesign that they are based on clocked in at 107 watts with slightly higher power supply voltages than mine have. They're really something if you have inefficient speakers and need to drive them but at low volumes they don't really have anything on a ~30 watt amplifier. Consider most of my listening is at levels you could have a conversation over and I'm like 3 feet from the speakers, so power for me is not a big priority most of the time. The power meters on my Phase Linear are set to max at 3.5 watts and I don't ever see the "overload" light blink.
 
As a designer of tube guitar amps and SS power amps, there is NO reason there is any difference between tube power and SS power IF it is measured honestly. You actually use the amp heads to drive the SAME speaker to compare the loudness? Power calculation has no bearing whether it's SS or tubes, P=IV = I^2 R or V^2/R. It is just that simple.

I studied a lot of tube guitar amps and enough SS guitar amps. The design on SS guitar amp are usually very cheap because people expect to pay CHEAP for a SS guitar amp. They are not playing in an equal field. People willing to pay $$$ for a tube guitar amp but expect to pay $300 for a 100W SS guitar amp. You can't even get a good speaker enclosure for $300 if it is a tube amp!!! You take a $1000 tube amp to compare to a $300 SS amp, of cause you think the tube amp is better!!!! Until the day when it is acceptable to have a SS amp that can sell for $1000, you'll never see a SS amp that is comparable. It's just simply marketing.

In audiophile world, it's a different ball game all together. here, we don't glorify distortion, we talk about clean power. Here, people are willing to pay BIG bucks for SS amp. The chassis, the internal circuit are of different world from SS guitar amps. I am new in designing audiophile tube amps, so I am not going to say one way or the other until I have the first real audiophile amp under my belt. I built a $250 kit of a single end tube amp, it is underwhelming to put it politely. People have been telling me I can't judge with that cheap amp and all. I put in some work in improving the amp already. I can say without any reservation, that I can design and build a $250 amp that put this kit amp in SHAME, absolutely kills it in every each way. I am going to invest at least $1000 to design and build another push pull tube amp to give it a fair comparison, we'll see what happen.

I have ideas to design a SS guitar amp that is so much improved from the circuits I've seen, it's just the matter of getting to it. It will be a while before I get to it.

I designed a few distortion padels also, I know how tube distortion front end is. I can tell you the SS distortion kicked the butt of the tube. There is a good reason why most of the distortion pedal used are transistors, not tubes. Guitar amps are market driven, if a day comes when people willing to pay the same high price for a SS amp as tube amp, there will be fantastic SS guitar amps that rival any of the tube guitar amps.



Another very important thing. Guitar amp only run to 5KHz, audiophile amp runs to minimum 20KHz. Tube amp will have A LOT of problem to have flat response to 30KHz. A good SS amp can easily have 150KHz BW, good ones can go up to 300KHz. My amps have power BW of over 300KHz, and slew rate of 30V/uS. It's a different world from tube amp. Also it is easy to get low THD with SS amp, tube amp is almost always hight THD than SS amp. I'll wait until I design a high end tube amp before I comment more, but these are very important for SS amps.


My suggestion to you is bring both amps to test on the speaker and judge it yourself. Tube amp is a lot more sensitive to the speaker because damping factor of tube amp is very low, it cannot control the speaker that well, so the sound is very speaker dependent. SS amp has none of this problem. A SS amp with low damping factor is still over 100 easily. SS amp can control the speakers.
 
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