Bret Ludwig wrote:
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.

Watch which petard you have in your own back pocket, Mr. Ludwig,
a'fore you make such comments.

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,

You made absolutely NO such claim, Mr. Ludwig. You're claim was
VERY simple, unambiguous and wrong:

"Subjectively tube amps of a given specification often (not
always) sound better than solid state amps of better spec.
Russ Hamm proved it in 1973 with his paper which
appeared in JAES and it has not been contradicted."

Hamm's article makes NO such claim, it deals SPECIFICALLY
with operation under conditions of sever clipping when THD
amounts are on the order of 30%.

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.

Absolute nonsense. Hamm's article makes no such statement.
You have not provided a single shred of evidence to support such
a claim.

Further, NO one here ever made such a claim, save you. The
statement was VERY simpe: ANY solid state amplifier with
substantially more power than 20 watts is going to sound MUCH
better than ANY 20 watt tube amplifier when both are being asked
to deliver more than 20 watts.

That means a 50 watt SS amplifier will do better at 35 watts than
a 20 watt tube amplifier trying to do 35 watts,.

A
Class B amplifier is of roughly 50 percent efficiency and so I figured
500 watts power consumption.

So what? What on earth does class B operation have to do with it,
since almost NO audio amplifier since that time ran class B. There
is but one or two such examples, and all are LONG off the market.

Further, what on earth does power consumption and efficiency
have to do with it?

A 20 watt Class AB tube amplifier might
at most pull fifty watts,

Just like a class AB solid state amplifier, which comprises MOST
of the solid state amplifiers on the market. The only difference is
the SS amplfiier doesn't have to provide power for filaments..


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".

This is utter and completely irrelevant claptrap, Mr. Ludwig. We're
not talking about efficiency, we're simply dealing with the fact that
ANY higher power amplifier will sound better than any LOWER power
power amplifier when trying to produce more power than the lower
power amplifier is capable. It has nothing to do with bias class, it
has nothing to do with amplfiier efficiency.

My numbers may be a little off

Your numbers are WAY off and completely irrelevant.

but anyone but you would get the concept.

The concept that is clear is that you made a specific claim which
was wrong:

"Subjectively tube amps of a given specification often (not
always) sound better than solid state amps of better spec.
Russ Hamm proved it in 1973 with his paper which
appeared in JAES and it has not been contradicted."

and now you're making further claims which have only
solidified the fact that you were wrong to begin with.

That ought to be self-evident.

What is evident is either your inability or dogged refusal to deal
with the fundamental tecnnical errors behind your assertions, not
to mention the fact that your cited an article which utterly fails to
support your, ahem, "thesis."