Tube Power Amp Reviews

Now that the Audio Research D-150 has been officially retired, and ARC President William Z. Johnson has burned his tube bridges behind him, that amplifier is already well on its way to becoming a classic within little more than a year after it went into (limited) production.

Its closest sonic competitor, in terms of those things that musically-oriented listeners have liked about the best tubed stuff, is the Luxman 3045. Unfortunately, Lux's custom-made out-put tubes for that amplifier have a tendency to go sour after anywheres from a week to a month of use, and a set of replacements ain't cheap. Lux is now recommending that owners convert to KT-88 output tubes, and are supplying instructions for the change.

But they admit that the amplifier will not sound as good with those. As of now, the D-150 stands as the best tubed-type power amplifier ever to have been commercially available with nationwide distribution. (We qualify it in that manner only because we have no way of knowing what may have been emerging, a unit per week, from some obscure genius's basement workshop.)

If you like the liquid transparency and high-end smoothness of the best tubed equipment, our advice is to hang onto your D-150 if you already own one, or try to obtain one if you don't. It may be a long time before those qualities can be bought in a solid-state power amplifier, and there may never be a day when they can be bettered by tubes.—J. Gordon Holt