Quote:
Originally Posted by Gabe001
... I wonder if a modern 'hifi' valve amp with all the bells and whistles costing five digit figures will deliver anything more in audio terms compared to the classics we're all familiar with.
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In the end a lot of the shortcomings in hi-fi sound (by which I mean the air vibrations, not the subjective experience inside our heads) come from the speakers. A speaker is a bunch of compromises. One of them is between physical size, distortion and sensitivity. Through the 1970's and 80's, as silicon made watts cheap, speaker designers were able to make smaller, lower distortion units and those are often what amps have to drive today. So what modern valve amps can deliver that the old favourites (Quad II, Leak Stereo 20, Radford STA25 etc) didn't is watts.
You mention McIntosh in another post. Despite having been in the valve amp business since 1949, their lowest powered valve amp in current production is a 75W/ch unit and the rest are all 150W/ch or more. Of course this is 'only' 10dB more than the Quad II gives, but if you're driving modern 84dB/W@1m speakers like the Bowers and Wilkins 607's rather than, say, my 45 year old 91.5dB/W@1m Yamaha NS1000's then you'll find most of that extra power is eaten up by the loss in speaker sensitivity.
Cheers,
GJ