Why don’t tube amps sound like tubes anymore?

@ arro222
Yes I should qualify some of my dogmatic, rigid ideas  vented on my above posting, I can agree there are some highly priced *refined*n ss amps, that have gorgeous bass/highs,, and mds,, not bad, not bat at all. But as others have chimed in, tube retification, provided the design is superior and tubes , pre are NOS, power tubes are high quality,,,can over take any ss amp ona  $ vs $  comparison. 

+ change out the caps in the tube amp to any faborite (mine are Mundorf Silvergold Supreme,,if they fit ,,if not go EVO oil), and now the tube easily over takes the ss priced point matched amp in the mids. 
The intergrated i am speaking of is the JOR with the screetchy EI90's, which made voice sound live right in your listening room. 
*Concert was on, live*.
all i had to do was add in Tele pre tubes, which i had no idea about then, as i felt too pricey,,I was wrong, and sold it for 1200. 
The Jadis Defy is perfectly *neutral* as others have described a tube amp sound vs ss sound which is not 
*pure ognaic, natural, life like staging**, ss is ss and forever will be &&Solid State*, yuckky.
Now agree the single ended  tubes, i am not a  fan of, due to my preferencev for inefficient 4 ohm speakers, 

But again, what ss amp  can match light jazz /vocals comming froma  300b/805/845 tube amp? Liquid magic. ss amps can never voice ~~ liquid magic~~
aagin to qualify, there are some tube amps that  do not live up to the ~~tube magic~~ in the mids. 

But tyhen there are no ss amps, that will ever voice ~~tube magic~~.
Look fora  new vid upload soon, maybe 2 weeks, as the 6550's Svetlana just arrived and randy is installing  electrolytics. 
2 weeks, should havea upload.

paul
new orleans

Improved engineering

Well we listen to systems, not amps......right?!

Get a nice 6sn7 or DHT preamp and mate it with a nice pure Class A SS amp and even tube amp lovers will be pretty darn happy. You don’t need tube rectification in your preamp to have it sound wonderful or even tube like. Frankly, I greatly prefer SS bridge rectification in my tube preamp builds. Far better dynamics and bass. If the design is right you still get what tube lovers love about tubes. Examples include the Coincident DHT pre, First Sound, TRL Dude and many, many others. All sound marvelous and are SS rectified.

Use the right toned cabling and front end source and your system will sound very much like a complete tube rig.

My first thought when I read the OP was nostalgia combined with naturally diminished hearing due to age.  Then again I could be talking to a mirror!

Mark

At the beginning only two words define this hobby :High Fidelity .  Amplifiers overall are getting better SS or Tubes the good ones at least are getting closer to that simple goal: high fidelity .A good tube amp and A good tube solid state  should not sound different  when they are properly matched to adequate loudspeakers .  Speakers and amps worked together.The thing is we have been all misled with adjectives with no technical  meaning . In fact, when amplifiers get rid of their specifics distorsions they  should sound closer to each other. A good friend of mine actually a reviewer got foul many times when I made him enter my music room blindfolded  while he was always claiming that  he could make the difference right away between SS and Tube.  He kept failing the blind test.This was more than 15 years ago.  Nothing really new.  There  are numbers of amplifiers reviewers rave about because the metal work look good or because they can be used as welding machine  but not that great in  playing music .That why blind tests have been always discredited by the pundits .  Even the sweetest Beard monoblocs( 12E L84 per side  what a great amp by the way on  the Quad) were not enough to  make him guess right more than one in three.  Comparing new gear side by side in our own system ,changing one gear at a time would  clear ours minds from the refrain « BEST AMPLIFIER EVER MADE «   until next one comes for 10K more  and if it  is a tube it is likely an old design of the RCA manual revisited now.at 30k a Piece  With better cap  , better transformer or resistors very little engineering .