Originally Posted by
Beave
For what it's worth, Dave is right that once an amp reaches clipping, all bets are off. Different amps obviously clip at different levels, and different amp designs also behave differently once they do clip.
I just think that with a speaker like the Sierra tower, which has a moderately high sensitivity and a moderate impedance, that you'd have to be really blasting it to be around clipping even with a modest amp.
On the other hand, I once was involved in a single-blind test at a dealer, where the room was really big, the speakers had a dip to about 2-3 Ohms in the midbass, and they were playing content with lots of midbass and playing at really, really loud levels. Some of the amps sounded awful, some sounded great, at the same (very high) levels.
So amps can make a difference - if the system is being played really loud in a really big room and/or the speakers are really low sensitivity and/or really low impedance.
But *most* of the time, the differences people ascribe to solid state amplifiers are a simple result of 1) mismatched levels 2) listener bias (conscious and unconscious)