Maximum Upgrade Potential

There is no question that people’s tastes change over time. They tend to work their way from the obvious parameters like bass and overall detail to imaging, then tonal balance, midrange bloom… etc. as they learn.

However, with well established high end companies… Audio Research, Pass, dCS, Conrad Johnson, MBL… etc. They are on a mission and incremental changes are not lateral at all… they are walking straight down a line towards their objective sound. This is not to say companies don’t falter a bit occasionally. ARC really tried to do what they did with solid state and they just could not do it and reverted back to all tubes. They have a well defined objective.

But successive releases of products, reduce the noise floor, improve the sound quality across the spectrum. Take ARC and Pass. One from the tube side and the other from solid state. Over the 90’s and 00’s they incrementally converged on reality… one from the warm but not as detailed side and one from the harsh solid state side. Converging on reality. 

Over the last twenty years, I spent a huge amount of time calibrating my listening skills, by attending hundreds of symphony concerts in the ideal 7th row center location, and acoustic jazz concerts… and listening to individual instruments. The same kind of things that top audio designers would do. I can hear them approaching and converging using different technology to do so.

So while the companies that have been around for a decade and are in lower tier high end may change this way and that. The companies that are serious long term players are moving in unison towards a very specific goal, with some individuality based on the technology they use, or which music type they want to sound the best.

By way of owning a decent amp(your case the PL Dialogue) for an extended period of time suggests the PL is competent at what a tube amp is supposed to do.

Tube amps aren’t’ doing anything different in those 20 years. It’s not an absolute must, buy you’ll just have to open the wallet wider depending on what you want.

There’s another level of WOW-possibly limited only by ca$h spent.

13 year PL user.

Thanks for all of the thoughtful insights.  It seems a better choice to save some dough and plan on getting a new amp instead of spending $1000 on tubes.  I've been chatting with Fritz of Fritz Speakers about a pair of Carbon 7 SE Mk 2s.  If the deal goes through I'll lick my financial wounds for a while and use them as a basis to select a new amp.

Musical tastes certainly evolve and refine over time.  Twenty years ago I was listening to lots of organ and symphonies, primarily on CD.  Now, it's leaning toward quartets and early instrumental and vocal music, mostly on vinyl.  The Slayer CDs rarely make an appearance in the home system.

The thing is you can always make things sound different, and you may be seduced into thinking that different is always better. It can certainly be exciting to "hear things you've never heard before" but do it enough times and you realize it's different, but not necessarily better.

I believe that improvements over the last 20+ years, and still ongoing today, differ depending on the type of amplifier. Solid state has changed significantly, as pointed out by @ghdprentice using Pass as an example. However, changes in SET amplifiers (300B, etc), for example, has changed much less. Yes, there have been improvements in capacitors and transformers, but essentially the sound of a 300B amp today is not significantly different than one 20 years ago.