OK, you already have a front-of-house stereo rig that you are happy with. But for your own stage voltage (and practice), you use a PS-2 (original) to drive a speaker cab. So you are not using the reactive load inside the PS-2 at all.
I’ve gone through the Malcontent videos and found some useful timestamps for you:
Some useful quotes around that timestamp from Steve:
Simply power output. Same frequency response, same circuit topology… PS-2 12AX7 vs PS-100 12DW7 phase inverter, gain/feedback trimmed to match… as long as the two are not in anywhere near clipping and they’re at exactly the same volume, I would challenge anybody to tell me which one that they were playing through in a blind test. You wouldn’t be able to hear it."
OK, take a list of how Steve thinks about these things.
But to you, the actual comparison is for PS-2 vs LXII. It really comes down to sonic difference, and that really depends on your rig and how hard you drive it. If you don’t drive the PS-2 very hard, then you will drive the LXII even less, so I would expect them to be fairly similar. There will be differences, but it’s the kind of thing you need to do an A/B test on.
Let me reach out to @JoeGamble as he is probably very familiar with these.
That completely answers my question. Since I run my PS-2 with the volume knob around 9:00, the tubes are nowhere near pushing or clipping. Hearing that Steve considers them sonically identical at clean volumes makes it an easy choice. I’ll stick with the PS-2. Cheers!