Describe ube sound vs solid state

Tube is the sound of yesterday just like your old tube TV. and solid state is sound of today just like your new LED TV.

Come on Beewax. You cannot generalize all solid states, similar to the way you cannot generalize all tubes. But I like your confusing analogy :-)

Sometimes different, sometimes similar, sometimes hard to tell apart at all.

Like most things, it all depends.

In general, the sound of "good quality" tube gear is more variable than good quality SS. If you like a certain flavor of sound, tube or SS but not both may be the only option. Both are capable of very high levels of technical performance (not to be confused with what a particular individual might deem to "sound good") that tend to sound more similar than different when done right.

Tube rolling with a lot of tube gear provides a unique way to tweak the sound not available with SS gear.

Mapman gets it...I think it's an interesting part of hifi dialog that great tube amps are often described as having "SS like grip on the bass," and SS amps will be described as having "tube-like warmth and harmonic content" or some such thing. I personally prefer a tube power amp for the tube specific harmonic content driven tone AND because I like messing with tubes, but the point of all this is great sounding music and luckily you can find it in either design camp.

Ube is a very cool sound.