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RE: And...

Taking things to extreme, the SET or single ended vacuum tube triode zero feedback low power output power amplifier with an unregulated power supply strikes me as the worst conceivably engineered general purpose audio design. They measure horribly but some people seem to like them very much. Some are very expensive but I wouldn't own one for free.

I do not like vacuum tube amplifiers of almost any type as they seem to have a peculiar type of distortion solid state amplifiers don't exhibit. I attribute this to the likelihood that the hysteresis loop in the core of the output transformer results in this sound. I think it may be a form of asymmetric harmonic distortion. I left tube amplifiers behind over 40 years ago and never looked back. I was surprised myself at the Vacuum Tube Valley audio show in 2007 that I was able to pick out by sound alone the only solid state amplifier at the show that I heard. It was the only one that didn't have this kind of distortion. To my ears it's even worse than crossover notch distortion. But a lot of people like them too. Generally their harmonic distortion is several orders of magnitude higher than well designed solid state power amplifiers.

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  Kimber Kable  

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