If you MUST have Altec and do not want to consider anything JBL, stop wasting you time trying every Altec under the sun and take my advice and go with the 19's. Especially with a softer tube amp and a better CD player like my NAD with Burr-brown op-amps and some "decent" cables, many of the higher priced cables do more harm than good. I use Magnavox "el cheapo" interconnects. I think I paid $20 for them (and unfortunately I cannot find them anymore anywhere
), but they sound better than the $229 Audioquest cables I tried.
Tubes make Altec's sing and smooth out the harshness in the mid-HF's quite a bit.. And contrary to what many people here have told you, the bass is exceptional, but you gotta choose the right tube amp and output tubes. Some of the poorer tube amps have this problem of not producing enough bass, and I will agree that most will not compare to a Solid State amp for bass, but their are several that work as well as a SS amp as long as you don't need SPL's of over 120 dB (something that I wouldn't recommend for ANY home speaker),
Your selling your other Valencias
, are these new ones that good?