Why do Tube Amps sound more romantic v SS amps

I’ve yet to experience the “hair on my arms stand-up” playing this track on the Bryston ss amp?

When you have a system that works, try to suppress the upgradeitis. 

@keeferdog

My last three sets of Speakers have been Sonus Faber. I was a long time user of solid state amps. They are really good (in general) at detail and slam. Well designed tubed amps frequently capture the warmth and natural beauty of music… the human voice for sure. Since I finally switched to tubed amps. I’ll not be switching back.

Quite by process of evolving my system I converged on Sonus Faber, Audio Research components and Transparent. This, it turns out to be a known synergistic combination.

@invalid "with simple designs fewer parts count” which leads to higher distortion, shorter “relatively good performance" lifespan, and higher maintenance cost, in order to bring tube amp back to spec. SS amps aging at much slower (x100) pace then tube, pl admit it.

I don't know where you get your tube amps from, there are tube amps from decades ago still running strong. Once solid state amp give up they take out circuit boards sometimes and you can't get those boards anymore because they are proprietary. Tube amps can be point to point wired and can be fixed at anytime in the future.

@atmasphere "an imbalance in power tubes will cause a 2nd harmonic, not a third"

not really, AB imbalance does contribute directly into third (odd) order harmonic increase. Perfectly balanced second (even) only order harmonics distortion, AB designs “distort" A and B the same way only if tubes are perfectly matched, which NEVER happened. it is very hard to pick matched tube replacement, which will age at the same pace to the <1% point.

Good designed SS amps have many AB transistors in parallel, which reduces imbalance problems. SS amps I have all are “maintenance free”, and there is no need to change any transistors due to aging degradation in 100 000 hrs life time.