Tell me if i got it wrong..

Forget it, gentlemen, I'm out. Every so often I become overly optimistic and put my finger in the water to see if anything meaningful will come up and bite. If you want to understand what I'm saying, then order the articles I wrote for Ultimate Audio magazine under the name Mark Bucksath on Musicality. For those of you not threatened by different ways of speaking, ideas, etc, thank you. For those of you who revel in anonymity in a microcosm to vent your neurosis, congratulations, you're a dime a dozen.

Well that puts rather a gloom over the day doesn't it?

I enjoyed this thread. Admittedly, it did make my head hurt a little. The notion that our primal instincts affect our listening, "visualizing" and ultimately the appreciation of music is fascinating to me.

Thanks to all who participated. I feel I've learned a lot from reading this thread.

C'mon, Asa, you needn't pee in the sandbox....

Wow, Asa, you are good! In your responded in 11-2-01, you
could just say listen to music, honestly. :-)

last paragraph:
"Importantly..."

Tubes do not "interpolate" values or anything else.

Solid state is not inherently more precise.

Jinmtvt has it wrong, completely wrong.

Since almost everyone's digital today has a real brick wall at just over 20kHz. the bandwidth of almost any half decent amp, tube or solid state will exceed that of the digital source by a wide margin.

The fact is that the very best solid state amps and the very best tube amps start to sound remarkably similar. They do tend to diverge in different directions,and that is due to certain inherent characteristics of the devices and the circuits that they are likely to be put into. So, the sound that we often refer to is more due to application issues both in practical circuits and less than optimal implementations and the characteristic signatures that they then produce...

Given the same bandwidth, neither is "more accurate" - at that point the only difference is the spectrum of distortion products. Which, in short is where you'd find something to measure that relates back to what you are hearing.

So, *if* there is a characteristic difference between tube sound and solid state sound it's gonna be found in the spectrum of distortion products...(and there is a real difference there)