What I was trying to get at in the last post, but doing a rather poor job of describing it, was sort of a theoretical comparison of two amps that were equivalent except in power output. Sure, realistically, no two amps sound exactly the same but would the bigger amp have any advantage when the extra power wasn't being used? Common sense would suggest it wouldn't but this is audio. Weird things happen.
Liked the explanation of crossover distortion in amps. Dr. Geddes went on about how sensitive our ears are to the crossover distortion in amps at the 1st Tulsa show ... it was the first time I'd ever been introduced to the concept. It also made some sense of the bruhaha that surrounds many SET amp since they don't (can't) suffer from it. Light bulb moment for me.
Your explanation of how it becomes a problem at lower volumes was also a light bulb moment. Never thought about how it can rear it's head as the volume goes down. It explains a lot.
As for the sub crossover weirdness, I was leaning towards the low input impedance of the amp (10k) as the issue but after more futzing around your call on the preamp seems right.
The solid state preamp is actually a headphone amp and has low output impedance and can drive the snot out of most headphones. It seems to suffer less than the tube preamps when driving the amp and the crossover. Still audible but not as much.
Thing is, I like the two tube preamps more than the solid state pre. Of course. So for now it's a tube pre with the rear sub and no front subs.
But there are still some experiments to try. It's a long pandemic and you have to do something ... expect things to change at any moment.
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