Tube Amp soundstage

Okay so here we go again, only mercifully for the last time. You are now down to admitting, "if designed that way."

Reminding me once again what a good idea it was to create the Hateful 18 list to keep track of which people are worth engaging with and which are not. It doesn't literally mean you are hateful. Although some of them surely are. (And not alone in saying this, I get PM's)
Its easy to pick one of my deliberately provocative comments and get your poor tender feelings all hurt. What a meanie. Boo hoo. What you miss in all this three_easy_payments is you took something I said that was perfectly correct and which you yourself proved you even agree with and then distorted it all to hell in order to call it rubbish.

I do not suffer fools gladly. So sue me. But neither do I deliberately make stuff up (also called LIE) just to insult. That is what you do, and all the time. That is why you made the list. And that is why I promise to do a better job in checking that list and avoiding having anything to do with your distasteful self ever again.  

Its not a game. You took my perfectly correct post, ran it through your cuisinart and turned it completely around then want to pretend its me. I never said anything about designers being mindful or otherwise. Designers never came up in my post at all. Now you're pretending it did. Crazy. 

What I did say is people prefer 2nd order harmonics. You yourself then argue with this and offer as proof that Nelson Pass himself states that 1/3 of people do indeed prefer 2nd order harmonics. In other words you say I'm wrong while proving me right. Word games, indeed!   

Never anywhere said anything about solid state designs, or designers, only talked about what people prefer, which you just proved I am right about that.  
Could it just maybe possibly be you completely misunderstood everything I said? I genuinely want to know. Because it happens a lot. So either you are a hard one to communicate with, or you are deliberately misleading. Which is it?

My bias? Okay, explain to me then how any amp, solid state or otherwise, can be "mindful"?

He meant dissonant but I get his drift and he is right, its just what I said above, SS odd order harmonics simply do not sound as good.

The distortion the valves offer, are the perfect form of chaos when they are done right.  

There is a reason for this. Tubes, and analog devices in general, tend to the same even order harmonics that are so prevalent in nature. Everything from violins and drums to tambourines and human voices is chock full of even order harmonics. So when a tube amp adds even a few percent of even order harmonics our brains easily blend it into one seamless whole. 

Solid state and digital however are not at all like this. The distortions they produce are far lower in magnitude, that is true. But we are so much more sensitive to unnatural odd-order harmonics that this seems not to matter. We hear it as more, even while we measure it as less. 

Well said. If we trace this all the way back to its roots we find at its heart a twisted desire to place what we can measure above what we actually experience. Everyone but everyone actually experiences the superior lifelike depth and quality of tubes. But when we measure them we see the (totally arbitrary) few things we are able to measure seem to measure better even though the amps that measure better wound worse. So we have to go through the 80’s amplifier wars and the 90’s CD and now streaming. All the while anyone with two ears can hear tubes and records beat the pants off digital and solid state.

There’s technical reasons for this but seeing as its technical mumbo jumbo that got us in this fix in the first place you can be darn sure I’m not going down that rabbit hole. No one ever beats a measurebator at tech talk word salad. Learned that lesson long ago.

I will however offer one slightly technical reason. Those of us doing this a while tend to notice simpler is better. Every single tiny little thing affects the signal, and so the more of them there are the more they must be the absolute highest quality. Pop the cover off any two SS and tube amps, the tubes are almost always hands down the simpler circuit with the fewest components. Quality matters more than quantity, and so for any given budget the fewer the parts the more you can afford to spend per part. It really is that simple.