Tubes vs Solid State - Imaging, Soundstaging, 3D

I submit that there isn't any rules for human hearing. It's clear that very few audiophiles can agree on a regular basis when it comes to which piece of gear sounds the best, or even better. It has been shown that people can even develop strong preference in A/B comparison where nothing actually changed. While I won't completely dismiss the idea that there's something to human hearing that's beyond scientific measurement, I don't believe that is any attribute of it that is consistent enough to be distinguished from placebo and personal preference.

Thank you to everyone that has commented on this thread.

Regarding solid state missing low level detail, does that then mean that tube amplifiers offer more subtle details which thereby produce a more complete amplification of the source material? I have been under the impression that tube amplifiers introduce distortion that is pleasant to the ears which is the hallmark of their signature sound. I am fully open to and happy to be wrong on this! I would like to know if tube amplifiers offer more information (more detail), less information (obscured by pleasant distortion), or simply different information (to each his own ie no technology is more accurate).

If solid-state amplification achieves its sharp details through the omission of low-level information, leaving a sharper contrast with the silent background, would this not be a plus for imaging as it allows sounds to be more readily located? Also, is this not an inherent quality of three dimensionality as the purpose of 3D is to stand out in relief to a background?

****would this not be a plus for imaging as it allows sounds to be more readily located? Also, is this not an inherent quality of three dimensionality as the purpose of 3D is to stand out in relief to a background?****

Yes, if one considers that to be a good thing even though it is accomplished at the expense of other things.

"Yes, if one considers that to be a good thing even though it is accomplished at the expense of other things. "

Frog, wondering what other things specifically?

Pinpoint imaging maybe?

I might agree with that but I tend to think of pinpoint imaging ability as a good omen, and maybe a good thing in some cases with recorded sound but not the end game.

Few listening scenarios in the real world are perceived in the absence of any surrounding acoustic context as a "pinpoint image" alone. More realistically there is a central focus and some spread around that.

Granted it is possible to set up lsitening and recording scenarios where each sound emitted is perceived as a "pinpoint" but that is just one scenario and a subset of all those possible.

I suppose this would boil down to the common question of whether reproduced sound does or should attempt to sound like a live performance. That one has been beat to death and I understand both perspectives.

I am in that says most things I hear I do not hear as pinpoint sources, so I do not want all my recordings to sound that way either. In some cases, that may be all there is to it, but that is the exception I think and not the rule.

I suppose the standards that are applied do correlate to some extent with human hearing rules. It would be hard to see how products could be sold if not.

What I am saying here in the last few posts is that for the most part, the measurement standards don't correlate all that well at all; about the only thing that gets much lip service is frequency response, based on the ear having response from about 20Hz-20KHz.

There is nothing in the measurements, for example, that acknowledges that the ear treats distortion as a tonality, other than 'low' distortion is supposed to be good. In practice though, it turns out that certain distortions must be very low, and others the ear does not seem to care about so much. There is no nuance in the specs!

I submit that there isn't[sic] any rules for human hearing. It's clear that very few audiophiles can agree on a regular basis when it comes to which piece of gear sounds the best, or even better.

You are confusing taste (for which there is no accounting) with actual perceptual rules, which vary over the entire population by about 1%. IOW there is a big difference here.

There are numerous examples, for example mp3s take advantage of the ear's masking rule (although not 100% successful in that regard) to reduce the amount of data storage.