Thanks for the comments above.
I probably wasn’t making my point very clear in my OP. I said “romance,” “warmth,” etc, as those are what I consider to be classic tube artifacts or colorations. These are positive attributes and mostly the reason for dealing with the additional “maintenance” requirements of owning tubes, IMO.
I want more of a good thing, not less of it, yet I see a trend where modern tube gear is often voiced to sound more like SS gear.
Apologies if my linguistic skills and choice of adjectives are poor.
@atmasphere - Thanks for the comment. You do make a distinction in your post between desirable and undesirable colorations, which I share. Obviously I’m not suggesting that having a component that sounds “bright and harsh” is a good thing.
As for recreating the experience of music sounding “real” in my room, I think I do pretty well with it, given the constraints of the obvious physics involved and the fact that I’m not extremely wealthy. I’m not sure why anything I said in my OP would be construed as my not having heard a good facsimile of the real thing in my own space. As an aside, I heard your pre/power gear in the Classic Audio Loudspeakers room at CAF 2019 and it was my favorite room at the show. I'd like to try some of your gear someday soon.
@dentdog - I owned the Chardonnay for a couple of years and enjoyed my time with it. I think Mick finds a nice balance with how he voices his gear. I’ve been using the Allnic L-5000DHT for a while and would love to try the Supratek DHT, but the wait-time from Oz is a killer.
@verdantaudio - thanks for the info. I was looking at some of your posts about a week ago, following the trail on a used Art Audio Carissa, which somehow lead me to your listing on eBay for the Conductor and then to your website. I wanted to try AA gear when I ran a horn rig some years ago, particularly the Diavolo 300b and the PX25. I hadn’t realized AA make a good linestage, though.
Anyway, thanks again. Tubes rule, as the saying goes, particularly ones which are unashamedly tubes.
