ss players vs tube players

Barto - it is really a matter of personal listening preference and your associated equipment as to which you would like better. Why limit yourself? Go with the Cary 303/300 and you have the option of both tubes and solid state output stages and can switch between the two on the fly. It also has 5 upsampling rates that you can choose between for the best sound ( or the most pleasing to you). To have further flexibility, you can run either XLR or RCA output to your pre-amp, although the RCA with the tube stage should have a pre-amp with 100k input impedence to compete with the XLR output. You can even do some tube rolling - there are lots of good quality NOS 12AU7 tubes around at decent prices. Have fun!

I like pie!

Seriously, ...both! I am running SS now, but it's a very tubelike SS (pirated straight from Trelja's useless Adjective list)!

No bearing on sound quality. Not like tube vs. SS amps and preamps. Overall design and quality of components is what matters here. Actually, the nuvistor has characteristics of both a tube and a transistor...sort of a cross-breed.

I know of a tube guy that recommends staying away from anything with nuvistor "tubes", due to possible QC tolerance problems involved during the manufacture of such a tiny pseudo-tube.