orpheus10, your ears tell you what you like, and I honestly believe no one really questions that. Where the tensions rise, is when audiophiles assume that because they "like" something, that it must be more accurate, or more like "live music" or what they think live music should sound like. They will go so far as to make up technical claims, about things they have almost no knowledge about, then defend those claims with passion and vitriol.
Tube vs. solid state amplifiers in an interesting paradigm. Very few audiophiles understand the complex relationship between amplifier transfer function with real speakers, how that impacts the performance of real speakers, what the overall result will be, the impacts of typically somewhat poor and rarely well tuned room acoustics on the overall system response, and then how equal loudness contours play into that overall system response at the typical levels most people will listen at.
When people tell me they have speaker X and they much prefer tube amplifiers, then say "SS amps are crappy, the measurements don’t mean anything", I just smile and nod. The difference between me and them is they don’t have any clue of the "why" of why they prefer tube amplifiers in their setup, hence they slag SS amps and measurements, while I have a pretty good idea of the "why", and hence don’t slag measurements, because I know the right measurement, i.e. a room response graph at their typical listening volume, coupled with system level, speakers included distortion measurements, perhaps with some system level, speakers included transient measurements (including decay) would show exactly why they prefer the tube amplifier. This is why Bob Carver was able to modify a somewhat low cost amplifier to be sonically indistinguishable from an expensive amplifier. He matched the transfer functions of the two amplifiers with the real speaker loads.
