audible distortion and tube gear?

If you think of distortion as a type of noise, then yes, you could say that if you start with a high amount of noise to begin with you are going to have a harder time, but not impossible, hearing low amplitude noise that's in addition to the original.

On the other hand, our ears are pretty good at recognizing differences, so that's why I'd say it's harder, but not impossible.

A bigger issue is the room acoustics, IMHO.  Clean that up and you can hear a lot of things you could not hear before.

Either tubes or solid state can be made to sound softer, more polite, warmer, etc. that frequently comes with a masking or blurring of detail usually most notable, but not exclusively, in the treble region where you’ll hear muted dynamics, air, reverb trails, etc.  I could see equipment that is voiced this way masking certain types of distortion and may be why you might be hearing minimal differences.  Conversely, equipment that is designed to be hyper detailed can accentuate distortion, so as with most everything in audio the key is finding the balance that sounds best to you with the music you listen to.  Hard to say given your description and lack of other pertinent info what you should be hearing, but if you share what equipment/cables are in your system and what CD you’re using you’ll likely get much better and more useful insights here.  Good question though.

You mean even order distortion vs odd order distortion this is different Then gross

Distortion think of this as lavor that the amp imparts

DAVE and Troy

AUDIO Intellect Nj

I know that I have read on this site about "tube sound" having something to do with the way tube gear handles distortion, but would tube gear make it harder to recognize distortion?

@immatthewj Perhaps, depending on how much distortion your amp has and that of the speakers.

Distortion is mostly heard as a tonality, a change to the timbre of musical instruments. With a pure sine wave, higher orders added are easily heard since our ears use them to tell how loud sounds are (so are keenly sensitive to them); you need a bit more distortion for the lower orders (2nd and 3rd) to be audible.

*low-lvl lurk*