My comment on Aesthetix is solely relative to other phono stages I heard. It is more noisy than Vendetta and other solid state and bigger/lusher than solid state should not be a surprise, but it doesn't mean that it is all gooey like a Jadis.
But, if you have not heard the Linto, Vendetta, or Groove, it is hard to grasp how 'fast' these phono stages are relative to tube, no matter how good, tubes are 1000x slower than the best solid state. That's fact, no design can fundamentally make tube to have a faster rise-time and higher damping factor than solid state design. For personal preference, I like fast, high impact sound, and thus I am using linestage from Spectral, and active speakers like ATC SCM50ASL.
Perhaps I should rephrase that "Aesthetix is the fastest tube phono stage, but slower than the fastest solid state phono stage"... that's what I really meant. It is definitely a much better stage the ARC PH3, but still more noisy than the PH3.