After 5 years of intensive research, I’ve nearly completed my first bucket list analog+digital audio chains emphasizing linearity and neutrality hoping to land somewhere mid-fi - Constellation Inspiration Pre+Stereo electronics to a Magico A5.
In addition, I subsequently want to explore quality “tube” sound and it seems that the 300B amp is maybe one of the best tube sounds. So I’m targeting the Volti Rival 100db speakers (seems relatively uncolored vs other efficient speakers) and am considering the following 300B amps:
1.5 ELEKIT TU-8600S kit
2.5 Line Magnetic LM-210 IA 300B
4.0 STEREO TUBE AMPLIFIER INSPIRE by DENNIS HAD CLASS A 300B
6.0 Woo Audio WA5 300b
6.5 Coincident M300B Frankenstein MK III
and plan to hook it up to my Constellation Inspiration Pre.
I know other options include a tube preamp or a tube integrated.
For tube sound to this newbie, am I going in the right direction?
Kingrex is offering some good advice. So is DasguteOhr above.
Here's something to keep in mind about SETs: If you really want to hear what they are about you need to have a speaker efficient enough that you never need push the amp past about 20-25% of full power. This is because the SET will start to make more higher ordered harmonic distortion around that level and the ear uses those harmonics to sense sound pressure. Since the power is in the transients, if your speakers lack efficiency, the amp will sound 'dynamic'. If you look at reviews of SETs, you'll often see that the amp had 'way more dynamics than you would expect for an amp of such low power' or something to that effect. This is entirely due to distortion.
With a 300b (and depending a bit on which 300b is used) this means you have about 2 watts of really useable power. So in the average room 100dB is the minimum efficiency to be considered.
IMO/IME you might want to consider supplementing the bass with a distributed bass array, perhaps using a set of Swarm subs made by Audiokinesis, and then have something (electronic crossover) to keep that bass out of your 300b amps. That will help you out a lot with the power issue.
Or you could try something that is push-pull.
I've done a variety of experiments trying to sort out why SET lovers prefer SETs over PP amps and from what I've deduced, the main reason is that the PP amp they are using when doing comparisons is considerably higher power than the SET and quite often isn't even triode. So for my experiments I started with a type 45-based SET. I then built up a pair of type 45 PP amps, using the same tube complement in the driver circuitry as the SET and the same types of coupling caps and resistors. The resulting amps, instead of 0.75 watts, made about 6 watts. They were far more musical and in every way- wider bandwidth (easily heard as speed and bass impact), more definition (vocals were far easier to discern for example) and smoother sound. But I felt one problem with that experiment was that the resulting amp had too much power which might have been unfair.
So a second experiment involved a 2A3-based amp, and to come up with a PP amp of the same power (about 4 watts), I built up a PP amp using a pair of EL95s in ultralinear mode (also running class A), driven by a single 12AT7 configured as a differential amplifier. One grid of the 12AT7 was thus the input signal and the other was to accept feedback, which was only used to reduce gain since the circuit was already quite linear. The idea here was to use pentodes since they are the most commonly used in the sort of PP amps that are typically compared to SETs. Again in comparisons the PP amp was better in every way- more detailed, obviously wider bandwidth (on the bench proved to be full power to over 100KHz) and every bit as smooth.
So I'm unconvinced that SETs offer any real advantage whatsoever although they do have a rather gothic appeal. They are likely to have a good distortion signature (innocuous and therefore musical), but you can get PP amps to have a good (innocuous and therefore musical) distortion signature as well.