Tubes? Transistors? Which are better?

Tubegroover, good points above. However, I avoid "ultimate truth and accuracy" in audio like the plague. Half the reproduced music I listen to never occurred in real time anyway. But if it did the last thing I would be worried about is what it is supposed to sound like. How will you ever know? You aural memory? Good luck. My enjoyment of audio increased exponentially when I stopped listening for what I was not hearing.

Khrys The ultimate truth is dealing with a bigger issue, the obvious differences between real and recorded. The fundamental stuff like, harmonic integrity, and timbre accuracy and dynamics. The stuff that jumps out at you. Audio with all its inherent colorations and limitations obsures the realness of music, it masks it. It doesn't take aural memory to differentiate between the truth and reproduced. It is as obvious to me as the difference between a cat and dog. No I certainly don't have ANY problem with studio recordings, rock and alternative etc. that are altered through mix downs, overdubbing and the like to get a particular sound. That type of music is not my reference nor should it be a reference at all. The fact is if you get real unamplified acoustical instruments to sound real, everything else will fall into place. Isn't The Absolute Sound the ultimate objective or are settling for less because a. It will never happen or worse, b. it really doesn't matter?

Khrys: You obviously are concerned above how your system sounds. You obviously have some sort of personal standard which drives or has driven you to discriminate in your selection of equipment. Ostensibly you have invested a fair amount of coinage in your system. And you are obviously intelligent enough not to have done that without any personal criteria. In these ways we are the same. Your personal experiences have, I would speculate, contributed largely to the decisions which you have made. I think that I was sufficiently clear in explaining my personal rationales. If your personal system were not capable of at least the degree of naturalness which you prefer, I don't believe that you would find it acceptable. I conclude that you do have standards and that you do demand a certain degree of accuracy for your personal enjoyment. The imagined original is explained in a previous post. You can read elsewhere here that I believe that personal taste is absolutely valid and that listening pleasure can be derived from even the most modest of playback systems(AM portable radio). I would also submit that the reason we are taking the time to construct comments and rejoinders is that this avocation is important to us and that it's in the details that we find the distinctions. Good listening to you. (double entendre intended)

Sedon: The concert hall is part of the total live music system. Each hall is distinctive and as an indispensible part of any given particular concert experience is "accurate". That's not to say that the same hall would be considered good. Some are actually fairly bad (we could discuss "good" or "bad" at another time). Consider the design modifications which have been made to certain major concert halls over the years(at considerable expense). As part of the total sonic event sequence, a hall simply "is". A good recording of a bad concert hall should sound like a bad concert hall.

waldhorner, re: your comments about differing concert-hall sounds - my point exactly! yust like w/stereo systems. live, unamplified music can sound way different in different venues. which one is right? who knows - whichever one ya like the best, i guess. that's what i try to do w/my home rig... of course, i want a flute to sound like a flute, & not a saxaphone! ;~) doug