Tell me if i got it wrong..

Asa, your well-crafted post is engaging but wildly built on
exagerrated, shaky "factoids". To relegate ss and tube camps to assigned cognition strata is patently absurd.
I first took your error in postulating "over-accuracy" with a grain of salt, believing that you were simply trying to metaphorically attach sound perception to the eye-brain's use of boundary recognition to "see" images more sharply. Most first or second year experimental psych students have done fun experiments in the lab explaining this. Colorists in art studios study this to death! So it may be the case that DISTORTIONS in signal reproduction, especially odd-order ones in the treble region, serve to similarly "highlight" transient (and therefore image? hmmm...) edges. But to throw the baby out with the bathwater by moving en masse to an amplification system that
may simply roll off the info, and/or NOT resolve transients as finely, hoping to thusly not "alert" the ear-brain into a kind of hyper-recognition of detail is an UNfortunate state...NOT one to be the goal of accurate (no such thing as hyper-accurate...c'mon, man!) AND satisfying musical reproduction systems. Lots of tube amps interact with speakers to pump up the glorious mids and soften the "ugly,
detail-laden highs" is another way of restating your premise? I'd rather leave the frequency response shaping to a GREAT speakermaker, and use neutral electronics and room treatment to acquire a satisfying experience.
Granted it costs more. It's EASY to get good sound with tubes CHEAP. Hell, I remember the utter coherence of those 5 tube radios of the 50s pumping a naked 4" full-range.
Those dudes had midrange honesty! Just be sure to roll the highs and make sure the FM response didn't have TOO good a signal to noise ratio, eh? The orignal cheap dither?!
OT3rdH, I use Pass Alephs. Tube sound (huh?) with ss bass, detail, and ultrareliability. So I guess I'm in your camp, too...somewhat. But Christ, man, let's cool it with the musicopsychobabble and try to look for REAL reasons for the elicitation of musical pleasure. I think PRAT is the big cahuna, followed by timbral accuracy (for me, as a pianist),
followed by lack of distortion (in all its guises).
I'll agree that tubes can provide decent PRAT, SOMETIMES timbral near-truth (depends on output impedence, speaker load, etc.), and generate lovely 2nd order harmonics (I used to play Hammond organ a lot as a kid...adding those 2nds and 4ths ALWAYS enriched the sound)... ear-brain again, while perhaps masking upper order and high freq crap that ss just allows through. So, for a reasonable price, you takes your pick:
somewhat rose-colored glasses OR a clear lens you have to clean a lot!
Thanks for the fun, Asa, and keep well. Ern
hyper-sensitivity to detail and data

euh mmmm...
i didn't understand nothing..thanhks to my great english :p

can't an SS amp sound exactly like a tube amp if tuned to ?
is the sound difference really related to the major composants or is it more related to the way it is build
and how the engineer thought about it ?

i mean..do all tube amps sounds the same ?
like the base sound.. compared to all SS the same too ?

Subaruguru, thank you for your response. Yes, you are wrong: my position on a cognitive attachment to accuracy did not imply, per se, or any other way, an acceptance of "overly-rolled" components. Most people who are attached to accuracy respond to a disclosure of its limitations by attacking what they perceive as its opposite argument, ie its either rolled or accurate, a limited departure for dialogue that the magazines have taught you.

On a content level, I'm confused because you attack content but offer no counter arguments. To wit: you say that my position is "patently absurd", assumably meaning that it is easily deconstructed, but you provide no contra-arguments, not even once saying why such a theory is flawed. Similarly, you histrionically say that my argument is "exagerated" and based on "shaky factiods", but you never say WHY that is the case nor cite which "factiods" you are taking about. In other words, dialogue is considered authentic when a person responds in an authentic way - with reference and argument.

Its not just about distortion - thats what accuracy attached people think and their quest for lesser distortion (read: mechanical artifacts in the sound-object) is symptomatic of that same attachment. Distortive images and non-distortive images can both attract the visualizing mind; it is the relationship between the object and space which was my argument, and which again you failed to address (other than some vague references to aesthetic theory [far beyond "colorists in art studio", whoever they are...] or supercial psych theory, which you again don't specify. What theories are you talking about and how do they elucidate your arguments - such as they are - and how do they relate to mine?

Which brings me to the words. Yea, I like "Big Cahuna", and yes, bigger words are an easy target in a venue where many people come only for entertainment, but here's my question: How can you patronize what I've said with off-handed remarks about entry-level psych, as if I should know and you do (and, therefore, you are sophisticated enough to understand them, assumably), and then complain about my use of those terms. In other words, if you are so erudite in their use and application, then why are you troubled by my use of them? Like your emotionally-pointed arguments that are not arguments, this seems disingenuous.

If you want to step up to the plate, then please, don't look to the grandstands for support while you evade an argument. Everyone wants to be a rock star...

Asa, please help me understand some of your above comments.

1. What is musicality as it relates to equipment. Give an example of a accurate, but non- musical piece of equipment. I always thought that if it's accurate, then it also really should be musical.

2. If accuracy and musicality are not mutually exclusive, then are they really in opposition? You seem to imply that they still are. If that's the case, would not a component that was "under-accurate", as opposed to your over-accurate, then qualify as musical?

3. Please define the phrase "objective mind" and explain why a "listening mind" is an objective mind. While you're at it you could also explain what is a "listening mind".

4. Is being highly attached to ones objectifying cognitive faculties a genetic fault or is it a learned behavoir?

I have more question, but I gots to go. I have to go down into the hotel lobby and be seen waiting for my limo.

Oh, you're no limo-waiter, Onhwy61. Thank you for you questions; they raise some very important issues. Admittedly, this is a very difficult area with a learning curve of trying to understand what each other is saying. I will try to do my best to answer your questions, in order:

1, 2 and part of 3:. The problem we first must clear up is that "musicality" is not some-thing out there. Language is prone towards abraction and sometimes we make these absractions into a thing (symptomatic of our objective cognitive faculties). For instance, I can not look out my front door and point to "democracy" because it not a thing, but a desription of an agreed upon thought between minds. Similarly, when discussing "musicality" we must be on guard to always remember that we are discribing a state of consciousness. Moreover, it describes a dynamic of movement of the mind, the listening mind, as it seeps deeper into the experience. In other words, my position is that "musicality" is characterized by such movement and that the nature of this dynamic is one that moves, upon first sitting down, from a cognitive identification to trans-cognitve receptibility; meaning that your mind's orientation to music changes as you listen from active identification using your thinking mind to a receptive space-of-mind that experiences the musical message, but which does so in a state absent cognition; when you look at Van Gogh's "Night Sky" you approach it searching with an active comparing mind - scanning brushstroke technique, composition, or perhaps, comparing to other abstract expressionist works, or other Van Gogh periods - then you slowly "take in" the work. This "taking in" is characterized by an opening which can be described by the dynamic of releasing the desire to cognicize perception. Each level, both cognitive and trans-cognitive, disclose symmetries of perception, and hence, knowledge, of the music. However, as the experience deepens, and becomes less cognitive-based in the mind, the perception of defining the experience as a thing out there decreases until the mind's propensity to objectify evaporates into an "event" of experience, ie subject/object dichotomies dissolve.

"Musical" components are ones that disclose truths of each level on the continuum moving from cognitive to trans-cognitive, and, importantly, catalyze that movement (the component does not cause the movement, but can facillitate it for the mind that can release an attachment to the power of objectified thinking). The important issue is that all levels disclose a truth indicative of their level (and, not incidentally, produce their own language terms, usually moving from analytic, object-focused visual based language, to emotive based, to, well, beyond language). In this sense, the levels are not exclusive, but inclusive (this is an integrative theory of aesthetics). What is objectified when first listening is valid, just as the experiential info disclosed at deeper levels is valid. The problem arises when those attached to cognitive processing (carrying that attachment into listening) say that theirs'is the only level, or that seeing a perception beyond their mode of perception is non-existent (and then they start with the accusations of irrationality, like scientists do when dealing with trtans-cognitive perception. See Desartes below). Components can be accurately musical ("accurate" an abstraction to describe desires towards greater detail, etc.) as the mind seeks for objective info to bound its experience, but also musical at deeper levels (and, which, we presently lack a language for because the gurus at the hi-Fi "journals" are attached to objectifying levels). People who see the mind as only having one mode of perception (active, cognitve)inherently relegate other experiences (tran-cognitive)(reason for this below).

First part of 3, 4: "Objective mind" is a simplified descriptive use for a a part of the functioning of thinking consciousness; the whole of thinking consciousness psychologists describe as "formal operational, hypo-deductive cognition" (using Piaget terms). I have not gotten into the temporal aspect because this is a big enough subject already (and, temporal comparison is also dualistically objectifying).

So, what is the objective mind, or what is the nature of its objectifying? We have evolved to see prey; look at a green tree and you can't see a green bird until it moves (it becomes an identified object as it moves in time). We look out at reality objectively based on evolutionarily-based structures in our collective minds. Our culture of predation of mind-against-mind in search of the accumulation of objects ("Capitalism", or Lockean mutually-reinforced rules of self interest)is both a symptom of this "genetic" and a reiforcement of it through the individual's minds acceptance of its assumptions that it learns from other minds. The objective mind, as we practice it, is highly reductionist and seeks to divide into either this or that, but genetics is not exclusionary of socialization, just as shallow active listening is not exclusionary of deep receptive listening.

Importantly, we possess this objective bias because we define our thinking mind as our only perception (Descartes' I think, therefore, I am). But this is false. Admittedly, it is a faculty that can bring many objects and increase your assumed viability, or allow you to objectify sound as you listen into a "statue garden" (as Valin is, symptomatically, apt to say), but it is not the only way to perceive reality. It is: I am, therefore, I think, sometimes. Think about it: when you looked at the sunset without thought, did you become non-existent? When you sank into the music and thought ceased, did you fail to exist? The silent receptive mind is the ground of cognition; it precedes it casually. The space around sound-objects is their ground of arisement; it precedes them. To deny the silent space of your mind or the space beneath sound is to deny your true deep nature, and also the deeper experience of music. Those deny deeper spaces of listening perception, or their value, deny a potential in themselves (accounting for their recoil).

Enough. Thank you for your patience.