Questions for specialists on “warmth”

I have never understood the tight association many see between tubes and warm sound. I have heard more accurate tube amps and line stages and slow, thick tube equipment. I would never tolerate such tube equipment. I have never heard bright and edgy tube equipment, but have heard such solid state equipment. I would never tolerate it either.

Much to my surprise, my present system includes no tubes anywhere. With one brief two month period about 20 years ago when I had an all Krell system, I have not had all ss in 40 years. It is not at all bright and brittle. It has much greater power than I have had in years. I did not go this way to rid myself of warmth, NO.

I think that digital front end and poorly set up and bad equipped vinyl front ends can sound bright, but the solutions is to rid yourself of them not to expect slow tube electronics can somehow ameliorate this brightness and edge.

I have never understood the tight association many see between tubes and warm sound.

I completely agree: In my experience there has been no correlation whatsoever with warm and the destinction between SS and tube equipment, at least not with respect to the definition of the term according to Tvad and Mrtennis.

The reason for me to go to tubes is the added realism that is more a result of better resolution, transparency, better transient response and better speaker-amp interaction. The simplicity of tube amps seems to play a big role too, in not destroying ambient information and details.

Finally for a simple clarification of terms since you are "new" here: Try the stereophile glossary before starting a thread:

warm The same as dark, but less tilted. A certain amount of warmth is a normal part of musical sound.

dark A warm, mellow, excessively rich quality in reproduced sound. The audible effect of a frequency response which is clockwise-tilted across the entire range, so that output diminishes with increasing frequency. Compare "light".

Of course you have a point, the term "warm" is used in all kind of ways, most not very accurate, the most prevelant being the one Tvad used, i.e. a tilded frequency response with attenuation of the upper midrange and highs.

Warmth in my opinion is when you have the upper and lower mid's to blend a bit better with a type of harmonic distortion that is pleasing to the ear, vs. the excessive overly accurate and piercing sound, or overly defining something like a womens voice, guitar, etc...with a more smooth and spread out sound. Basically the way I see it is if you hear a little warm and fuzzy in the middle making it less direct at you, its kinda like it spreads it out and has a more faded roll off with a unique fatter or deeper kinda echo quality.
How do you get there? Not sure, but so far the only way I have kept pretty explosive dynamics, with a good solid touch of warmth and not going to far one way or the other is with:
1-Paper drivers to handle the mids..

2-Tubes in most cases have the ability to help and tube rolling can find this character if you try.

3-Pretty high efficiency just so its not too warm and dynamics don't get lost easily.

4-mostly copper based cables with the occasional silver coating, but you gotta experiment.

5-very strong power supplys which is why I pretty much went with a good tubey sounding preamp and neutral solid state amps.

....Most other variations of equipment have been tuffer to achieve such results for me. And yes in a way Vinyl is far easier to reach this magical "warmth" By default, but digital can do it, it just takes a pretty good D/A conversion of the right type to make it happen.
This is not the end all be all, but just my results after years of looking for the most musical simple sound that has dynamic definition, but still pleasing with warmth.