Valves give
You forgot “are considerably more expensive”! 
You ain’t kidding.
On another forum we just had a question about import duty thresholds. The guy wants to bring over 2 new-old stock EL84 power pentode valves from the US at £280 the pair.
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Valves can actually make a listener more convinced the singer is ‘in the room’. It is something to do with their distortion profile.
Sounds amazing. Pity the prices keep rising so much - a lot of them are made in Russia.
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So would I but time moves on and the Wiim ultra pretty much wipes the board in terms of cost, performance, connectivity and it has a display and software. Likely to be my next purchase for french home
Bumping this back up if relevant as Bluesound are releasing new models.
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That’s broadly correct - with the caveat that good circuit design will decrease the effect.
Distortion with valves tends to stress even harmonics which are ‘in tune’ with the original sound whereas a transistor when over-driven produces more odd harmonics that tend to clash.
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Isnt that why they use negative feedback loops to reduce distortions, better the amp better the designof the feedback loops in theory.
Negative feedback is a useful tool for keeping an amp clean, but it does suck volume away. I added a neg feedback loop to my little 5W guitar amp and it did what I wanted in terms of tonality, but it also sucked quite a bit of volume.
It’s actually quite a lot of fun, changing component values or modifying circuits to get the tone you think you want.
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5w so you didnt have much headroom to start with there AM.
5W through a 10" guitar speaker that delivers 101 decibels at 1 watt/meter is quite surprisingly loud. As I found out playing a gig on a village green, it’s not enough for a big open-air space, mostly because of the small speaker area, but it’s enough for quite a big hall in in the context of a band without a kit drummer.
Power ratings are slightly odd. My Vox AC30 would deliver a nominal 30W from 4 X EL84s through 2 inefficient speakers rated at 97 dB 1W/M and was dry and clean until I reached volume levels that would make the front rows cower (heaven knows how the front rows coped at Queen gigs!?). I used a Marshall-clone 18 watt through a single 12" speaker of 100dB efficiency for open air stuff 15 years ago, and had a lot of headroom. Yet at that same gig was a guy using a digital modelling amp of nominally 50 watts class D output who struggled to make himself heard at all. My Hartke bass head delivers 300W of class D power, and I’ve only ever once been asked to turn down.
I know watts should be the same regardless, but some watts seem more equal than others. FWIW a typical bedroom guitar amp with valves these days is 1W. My Vox Adio practice amp is 50watts class D.
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I think a valve guitar amp will always sound louder than a modeller with a significantly higher wattage. I think it’s to do with the even-order harmonics, as @_Brian mentioned, and also perhaps more care being put into a simpler design.
I’m not sure that’s the case with bass, though it’s a long time since I used anything other than Class D.
Another point that often gets overlooked is that loudness, as perceived by human ears, is essentially logarithmic.
In practice, this means that a 100 watt amp will be twice as loud as a 10 watt amp, which in turn will be twice as loud as a 1 watt amp - assuming that they are all correctly coupled to loudspeakers of identical efficiency.
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And that is further complicated when you factor in speaker sensitivity, which again is measured logarithmically!
Which is why a 1 watt amp can sound louder than a 30 watt amp. Although I must say that there is no way the volume of my Yamaha THR 5 watt practice amp can compete with my 30 watt Epiphone Blues Custom 
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Not forgetting RMS value vs peak music power as used by later generations of marketeers
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aka “Chinese watts”. 
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Speaker efficiency can make an enormous difference, if you care about that sort of thing, and is one of the reasons I included it in my comments. Some models of Jensen were as low as 94-95dB 1wm compared with the Celestion blue and some Eminence models pushing out 101-102dB.
Indeed. The Eminence Lady Lucks in my Blues Custom are 99dB/w/m which explain why it’s so loud…
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Thats why some amps go to 11
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