Solid State vs. Tubes - What if Transistors came first?

Ha, ha!  🐍💩

"If you pick the correct....ingredients...…..you’ll be happy with the outcome."

rodman99999,

As you mentioned, silicon just does not give that right feeling. It gives that artificial impression. Cold and technical. Not warm and natural while slightly, but pleasantly, imperfect. The inconvenience is that silicon can last longer while other vacuum(ing) devices degrade quickly and are better replaced as soon as any deterioration is noticed. And that becomes expensive in the long run.


In other words, tubes may make you feel better while transistors will last longer and give you enough satisfaction for longer time. That is what I meant.

Glubson, your statement is definitely true, and carefully worded, but only if the person in question is how do you say it, oh, yeah, deaf.

"Cold and technical. Not warm and natural while slightly, but pleasantly, imperfect. "

This argument reminds of the argument of amplifier feedback.  There are those who believe feedback is better and there are those who believe feedback is worse.  There are measurements that show feedback has lower distortion therefore it must be better, but listening impression tells another story.  Just like solid state vs. tube.  SS measures better but somehow tubes sound better to human ears but less than perfect with measurement.
Back to feedback, I had to chance to read an article from Pass Lab, and apparently he did some measurements on how distortion affected by feedback.  Audiogon does not allow posting a picture so I can't post that graph here, but what he found that although feedback does reduce "overall" distortion, it increases periodic distortion.  That is the distortion curve of feedback is "overall" lower vs. non-feedback, but there are spikes in the distortion curve that extends to multiple higher frequencies.
Back to the argument of SS vs. tubes, I suspect something similar is happening to SS.  It's the higher distortion order which extend to higher frequencies that make it sounds cold and technical.  These higher distortion spikes are very narrow so they don't add up to much in term of measurement, but the ears are sensitive to it.

I believe these higher order spikes fundamentally make music sound less than musical.  It's the extra high frequencies that our ears apparently don't really like.