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

One huge thing I have noticed is that solid state gear responds dramatically to power cord/AC line changes.  I decided to swap my PC’s around on my gear and the results are huge.  Placing a Transparent Reference Gen 5 power cord on my Krell Vanguard allowed the music to expand, become more relaxed, and high frequencies became more a part of the soundstage, rather than being over exaggerated.  Very tube like actually...fuller, warmer and more dimensional.

most never used snubber circuits to deal with the fact that diodes ring.

Actually its the power transformer that rings, which is why snubbing the rectifiers is often not that effective. HEXFRED rectifiers help, since it is the capacitance of the rectifier interacting with the inductance of the transformer that causes the ringing (otherwise known as a 'swept resonance'). But is actually the transformer that is doing the ringing!

Dave_b, I used to be pretty skeptical about power cords and such, it's also interesting that you mentioned SS being sensitive. When I bought my Yggdrasil DAC it was really bright. I initially thought that it was something downstream, an interconnect issue or something, but after spending a ton on ICs, I eventually relented and bought a hospital grade isolation transformer after a number of people suggested doing so, it fixed the problem. When I bought my tube preamp Don Sachs told me that I needed a good cable for it, but he suggested that virtually any heavy gage cable would be fine, so for tubes it's just a potential issue, and it would seem that for SS, it's not only about supplying sufficent current, but depending upon your incoming power it may well act as a filter, a filter that a tube based component apparently doesn't need. If so, that could also help explain yet another reason many prefer tubes. If they had unaddressed power issues when using SS gear, assuming for the sake of argument that tubes don't share that problem, would be one more reason that many prefer tubes.

Tube amps are pretty sensitive to power cords too...

Perhaps I stated my case inadequately.  What I was inferring was that power conditioning per se can dramatically alter the resultant sound from a SS amp/device.  Tube gear does respond to power quality as well, but does not seem to change its predominant characteristics to the same degree.  I’ve owned a lot of both types over the years.  Just my experience.