Certainly solid state is more efficient than tube, but that doesn't have anything to do with sound quality, does it? Digital amps are even more efficient than typical class A/B linear amplifiers, but you pay dearly for that efficiency in degraded sound quality with high amounts of out-of-band garbage being fed to your tweeters, thus causing distortion in the audio band as a result.

I'll take inefficiency, thank you.

At any rate, my own system uses horn loaded drivers in an actively bi-amped arrangement. The power amp for the woofers is only 60 watts, and the amp for the tweeter horn is only 5 watts !, yet with 106dB efficiency for 1 watt, I can produce way, way more output than anybody could stand.

I don't care for hybrid solutions since there is still a solid state output stage, still producing the solid state distortion signature, though not so much as an all-solid state amplifier.

However the main reason I don't like solid state output stages is because of crossover distortion, which is especially bad when using efficient speakers. Typical solid state class A/B power amps only run in class A for perhaps a watt or so before switching to class B - that transisition is smack dab in the power level where most listening takes place, and where all the subtle details of music reproduction resides.

Crossover distortion is especially nasty sounding.

By contrast, a class A/B tube amp will remain in pure class A for about 1/3rd of it's total power output before switching to class B. With my 60 watt tube amp, that is 20 watts before switching to class B. Single ended triode tube amps such as the 5 watt one I use for my tweeter horns don't exhibit crossover distortion at all since they are always running in pure class A.