Is there actually a difference?

Why doesn’t someone else use this approach??

No-one makes SITs. They can be a bit fragile too!

I'm not sure input capacitance is an insurmountable issue.

I'm not one of those who automatically cringes at feedback.

I'm not either, but one thing should be abundantly clear at this point- even though tubes have their weaknesses, they are a lot easier to use to build a circuit that makes less of the distortions that the ear finds particularly offensive. Funny that no-one has stepped up to the plate to fix what's wrong with transistors!

If the industry had a weighting system on the harmonics produced by an amplifier, we'd probably see some change. We've known since the 1930s how much more sensitive the ear is to higher ordered harmonics than it is to lower orders, but little has been done about that in terms of circuit design- we've actually made it worse! That is why we are having this conversation right now: in a nutshell, the industry doesn't **want** to do anything about it, because it *costs too much money*.  So it puts its head in the sand, hoping somehow our ears will change despite millions of years of development :)  For example, if there was a range of SIT devices; signal, driver and various output devices, tubes would be gone. All done- history. But that isn't going to happen, so in all likelihood, if you have grandchildren that care about audio, they will be having this conversation decades from now.

Regardless of the technology/topology, if YOU can’t hear a difference, there is none(in your universe).

In my opinion, it would be VERY easy to set up a double blind test where people would be unable to hear differences in various equipment. I would love to find a skeptic to work with where I pick the speakers, and the high end equipment. The speakers I would use would be 8 ohm, and over 90DB at 1 meter, not a difficult load, and very efficient. The difficulty comes into play with the DOUBLE blind part. Switching between 2 systems, level matching them, keeping the testers in the dark, and being able to immediately switch back and forth between gear so as to assist people in hearing differences would be the most difficult part. Anything truly random could have you listening to the same system after hitting the random selector switch 20 times before hearing the other system. I think a double blind start, and then allowing the listeners to swap systems at will would make far more sense. Honestly though I have strong suspicions that the naysayers have been allowed sufficient free reign to allow them to game the system. I think that the most important part of the test would be ensuring that the speakers are extremely articulate. I believe that there are many speakers out there that would easily mask differences. Other announces such as acoustically lively rooms, as in tiled floors, or excessively dead rooms, as in rooms with heavy carpet, and foamed walls could have an effect. I am not a room treatment guy, I figure music is played in imperfect rooms, but I do believe that in a double blind test too hot or too dead a room could color the results. I'd really like to be involved in one of these tests before ascribing any merit to them. I think that they could too easily be rigged otherwise.