Tubes? Transistors? Which are better?

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

Well it's you for me and me for euphony. We're probably talking semantics here but at least you have me thinking which is the whole point. For all of you looking for the "absolute sound" some questions: How much enjoyment do you get from hearing bad recordings reproduced accurately? Do you ever judge your system by how bad it sounds with bad recordings? If you're talking accuracy why not? Do you have a list of favorite bad recordings to evaluate the accuracy of the systems badness? If not, don't you think the other half of accuracy is being neglected? Have you ever demonstrated how bad your system can sound with a bad recording? I know, you only listen to "good" recordings. Be careful lest you confuse absolute with absolution

I guess I'm too "careful" to even try to answer such convoluted questions.