In one of the best demo's I ever heard Chris Brady of Teres Audio swapped out a number of components in an otherwise static system. He changed platters, motor drives, some other stuff I forget after all these years. Each change was one at a time. So you knew whatever you heard exactly what it was. At one point he changed phono stages.
In the beginning the components in the system were all tube. Of course the sound was easily heard to change from platter to platter, motor to motor, etc. But there was an overall character to the sound that was there all along, and it only became apparent when the phono stage was changed. Now this wasn't the point of the demo, but I know Chris and I heard the change and so I asked him about the second phono stage. Yes indeed it had SS in it.
I forget which one it was. Doesn't matter. Point is, even a little SS adds a layer of artificial hardness, grain, and glare that just isn't there with tubes. Its not a lot, at least not if its really well done like this one was, but its there.
It won't cancel out the benefits of your tube amp any more than anything else. Its no different really than a poor power cord, interconnect, or speaker cable.
I have no idea what "cleaner" means but there are as always tradeoffs. If you listen for noise then you need to know its much harder (read, more expensive) to get really low noise from tubes than SS. If you listen for music then you need to know its darn near impossible (read, regardless of price) for SS to make music the way tubes just naturally seem to do.
Ultimately all you can really do is try these things out and hear for yourself. I've never found a SS phono stage I could live with. Although, they are not all the same. SS vs tubes is not an all or nothing deal. Technically, my Herron that I really love is not all tubes. Nor was my Audio Research PH3-SE. They are what I would call mostly tubes. Brought home an awful lot of phono stages along the way in figuring this all out. Hope this helps.
