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No. It is a matter of equipment matching.

Tubes will make more power into higher impedances, transistors will make more power into lower impedances.

The lower the speaker impedance, the more important it is to keep you speaker cables short!! If you have a low speaker impedance and long speaker cables, don't expect a lot of bass of a tube amp.

Transistors will often have punch but not a lot of definition. Tube amps tend to have definition but often less 'punch'. This is a generality, not a hard and fast rule! Bass, like all other frequencies, actually has both aspects. So an amp lacking one is deficient, regardless of which aspect it lacks.

Real bass, the kind that you hear in live situations, does not have 'tight' bass often associated with transistors. It simply is what it is. IOW, if you experience 'tight' bass with all your recordings, the likelihood is high that you are experiencing a coloration.

To get tubes to play impact in the bass region, you need a speaker that expects the characteristic of tube amps (often a higher impedance is helpful), that is to say, the characteristic of making constant power regardless of load impedance.

To get transistors to play bass, the speaker should expect that the amp will make constant **voltage** into any load. Often a lower impedance is employed (B&W 802 is a good example).

Neither amp type will succeed at these conflicting ideals (power vs voltage)- that is merely the ideal for either camp.

Tubes are thus on a 'Power Paradigm', transistors are on a 'Voltage Paradigm' and speakers are designed to work under the rules of one of the two paradigms, but rarely both. Anytime you mix the two paradigms (IOW- a speaker that is expecting tube characteristics as opposed to transistor) you will get a tonal anomoly. For more info see:
http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html

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