Tube sound is not about warmth. It's about correct presentation.

OP, “Tube sound is not about warmth. It’s about correct presentation.”

I absolutely agree. I suspect that the term warm came when solid state entered the picture as it was cold, steely, and harsh… with a compressed midrange. Warmth refers to a fully fleshed out midrange without the sound dominated by harsh trebly distortion.

Presentation. I could not agree more, well designed tube gear gets the presentation right. Solid state tends to over emphasize details, venue and bass slap. This brings up an unnatural presence of the mastering and venue. While it is exciting to hear some violinist move his foot during a performance or the London subway train rattle under the symphony hall… is this really enhancing the music? Or taking the focus off of the music.

Tubes tend to get the presentation right, get the gestalt… the core of the music right. Now some companies have pushed their tube designs to asymmetrical capture the details. But companies like Audio Research, Cary, VAC, and Conrad Johnson have remained true to getting better and better at capturing the music and keeping the presentation real. After ten years of attending all the symphony orchestra conserts in 7th row center seats I can attest to how well they do this. The violins are properly placed… not artificially dropped in my lap. Rock albums do not take the cymbals from the back… carefully integrated into the song and put them in my face. While, it can be exciting to hear this… over the musical spectrum it screws up far more music and the musical experience than it makes sound great.

ghdprentice, excellent post. Not only because I fully agree with what you said.

My experience with tube amps has not been better than solid state. I've liked some tube amps well enough, but I have yet to hear what it is that gets others so excited about them. In any case, I'll agree with the OP's assertion that proper presentation is what I'd want from a tube amp, and I've heard some do it just fine. 

ghdprentice's description suggests that good tube amps sound plain and natural, not exciting or magical. Maybe that's what I failed to understand while listening to them. I've read so many glowing reports of some captivating, mesmerizing, transcendent effect that I expected to be wowed, when that's the opposite of what they do.

In this hobby anything opposing tubes in general and S.S. or digital and analog or turntables to dac, or music lovers versus audiophiles , is almost more annoying than informative ...😁

The reason is simple: the quality is more in the implemented design than in the parts choices and too many factors differentiate each customers journey, and needs , and ears, system coupling , room acoustic, psycho-acoustic biases , fetischism, and knowledge etc then imposing a choice once for all for all situation is preposterous ...😁

Psycho-acoustics and acoustics rule over gear, when synergy is reached ...And rightfull mechanical and electrical embeddings controls exceed many upgrades half of the time if not more in acoustic impact ...

These rules apply for most people with limited budget not for people with no limit for audio budget ... Then my rules apply for most people who must make CHOICES and who cannot afford 500,000 bucks system and acoustically professionnally designed room ...

For example the fact that on a very costly system a costly turntable can beat AT THE END a costly dac had no useful information for most of us and our more mundane low cost choices ... It is better to have a top dac in an optimized room than a top turntable in a living room ...Too much factors are at play , it is useless to claim anything superior once for all and for all needs ...

@mahgister +1

putting all tube amps in one basket and comparing it to single basket wit all SS designs is a little bit “incorrect sound equipment design development” representation! :-)

there are plenty of good sounding, warm (meaning linear) SS amps, incl x-fet, v-fet, darlington, class A, G etc on market. typically “warmer” sounding SS amps cost more, because devices used for output stage perform better (less distortion with less fb) at lover current, thus require more of them, matched/selected, in parallel.

warmer sounding tube amp is “easier” to build, if you have high quality matched tubes, expensive transformers, capacitors etc., which cost plenty. tube amps require more often maintenance, tube replacement, bias/bal adj. etc. 

for 25 W range amp I prefer tubes, for higher power and low freq. content music I prefer SS (accuphase A, ML).