If the "party line" happens to be science and empiricism, I'll toe that line every. single. time.
Yet again, you are twisting words and obfuscating the issue. I am loathe to repeat myself needlessly, but since you obviously have not read any of my posts in this thread, I feel I am justified. I have not claimed that all amps sound the same. I have not claimed that different tubes sound alike. That is something you have invented as false evidence against the "idiosyncratic orthodoxy." (Might as well go all the way and call us the "axis of evil"....)
In reply to:
Similarly, Alan Lofft's characterization of tube components as "distortion generators" is a laughable generalization
Your inability to see that distortion simply means an introduction of something into or a substraction of something out of the original signal is laughable. Tubes do just this.
In reply to:
The idea that any solid state amp with similar output power rating and a similarly a flat frequency response output curve from 20Hz-20kHz will sound like any other amp with a similarly flat frequency response curve is demonstrably wrong.
Demonstrably wrong because of the evidence you cite? That people don't all own the cheapest amps? You call that evidence? Laughable.
In reply to:
I also think that much longer term experience with various components can reveal sonic qualities which are not immediately apparent in an A/B test.
The human being's auditory memory is demonstrably short. Any differences realized over the long term are most likely due to outside factors, not the least of which is faulty long term auditory memory. (It could be the relative humidity of the room, or you may have just gotten over a head cold that negatively impacted your hearing, etc., etc.)
In reply to:
...truer to the original source...
Ahhh. You should not have dropped that in your post. A well-designed solid state amp will pretty much always give you a truer to the original source output signal than a tube amp. (This goes back to the whole distortion thing.)
