The debate about tubes versus solid-state has occupied this hobby for sixty years, and for most of that time we were active participants.
Our BHK amplifiers and preamplifier — the product line Bascom King designed for us — were built on the idea that the best answer wasn't a choice between the two. Tubes at the input, where their natural character and low-order distortion profile shaped the gain and the sound, feeding solid-state output stages capable of delivering real current and control. It was our way of saying both sides had something right.
Then we moved to the PMG line, and something shifted in how we think about the question.
It isn't that we resolved which technology wins. It's that we stopped asking that question and started asking a different one: which parts of the circuit actually matter most, and how do we master those? The answer turned out to have less to do with device type than with circuit topology, feedback architecture, power supply design, and the way all of it works together as a complete system. Get those things right and the choice of tube or transistor becomes a smaller variable than most people assume.
The tubes-versus-solid-state debate was always partly a proxy for something else — for questions about harmonic structure, about the relationship between an amplifier and a speaker, about what low distortion actually means when the measurement and the listening experience don't fully agree. Those are real questions worth taking seriously. But they were never really about tubes and transistors per se.
We've gotten better at answering the underlying questions directly.
The debate isn't over because one side won.
It's over because we found a more useful question to ask.
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