Arny Krueger wrote:
Bret is also implicitly claiming that a 20 watt tubed amp can sound as good
as a 500 watt amp when 500 watts would be required to avoid clipping. This
is complete and total nonsense.

Your debating petard has hoist you as usual. My claim was based on the
idea that when listening to classical music at normal room volumes
through a speaker of particular efficiency, (where I don't know what
efficiency that is the author-it might have been PWK or an employee
thereof), the average power might be two to five watts, with peak
overloads that a 20-watt tube amplifier would render listenably clipped
whereas to be similarly undistracting (to say nothing of not killing
tweeters) a 250 watt (output) solid state amplifier would be needed. A
Class B amplifier is of roughly 50 percent efficiency and so I figured
500 watts power consumption. A 20 watt Class AB tube amplifier might
at most pull fifty watts, depending on its Class A power point and
heater draw. Therefore, as anyone can see, the solid state amplifier
has better power efficiency, but, the tube amp at 50 watts pulls less
power than the SS amp at 500 (at full output) or even 80 (I speculated
its quiescent draw.) to do what to the human listener is "the same
job". My numbers may be a little off but anyone but you would get the
concept.

First, Hamm's article by title states "transistors _can_
sound better than tubes", which is sometimes true, not
that they "always do" which we know to be false.

That ought to be self-evident.