stuartk  I think we’ve all had the experience of being initially seduced by a particular aspect of a piece of gear only to find after more extended listening that other, less appealing aspects emerge. 

For me, it's important to put in sufficient listening time, utilizing a range of material, and preferably, in comparison to another component, before arriving at any conclusions.

Aural memory is fragile. And 2 sounds comparison is harder if they are timely separated. So, I record the sounds with a cam or cellphone. Repeat listening before and after recordings makes easy to find which is better. Alex/Wavetouch audio

@carlos269 I respectfully disagree with your thoughts on amplifiers etc.  An amplifier will almost always measure the exact same from a frequency response perspective.  And if distortion/harmonic peaks are kept under let's say -80 for discussion purposes (although seemingly -60 db seems to be the point at which most people can differentiate quality), there will be zero measurable difference between the two components that should be audible.  That being said, the sonic differences between the amplifiers I own cannot be chalked up purely to response and the measurements at least how we currently measure gear.  If you're saying there's a digital way to make a solid state amp sound like a tube amp or a tube amp to sound like a solid state amp, I'm here to tell you that that's just plain false.  Even within solid state designs there are sonic qualities that cannot be simply adjusted for with digital controls, such as EQ etc.  As someone who has tried multiple amplifier configurations in a treated acoustic space with high end gear, amplifiers absolutely do not all sound the same with digital correction

Aural memory is fragile

Aural memory is resilient.Especially when it was trained professionally or by our personal musical history.

What is not robust is aural memory for arbitrary sounds, music you dont know or you hear in another set of acoustical environment than your own...

For music you know by heart in your own set of acoustics parameters ( in the system/ room of the  owner's) aural memory is robust...

The only one who contest that are ASR ideologues for their site marketing..

Another thing aural memory is stored in the unconscious deep layers of the  body and manifested as feelings...

When i tuned my room this body/ memory guides me...Not my short term aural memory for arbitrary sounds..

Auditory Reserve and the Legacy of Auditory Experience

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4279143/

«We further theorize that the Auditory Reserve is an emergent property of the auditory system, such that it reflects both the flexibility and durability of the networks comprising the auditory system.

By calling it a reserve, we are implying that the Auditory Reserve reflects neural resources that are accumulated over time and moreover that these resources may not be utilized only when needed.»

Rapid formation of robust auditory memories: insights from noise

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20510864/

«Before a natural sound can be recognized, an auditory signature of its source must be learned through experience. Here we used random waveforms to probe the formation of new memories for arbitrary complex sounds. A behavioral measure was designed, based on the detection of repetitions embedded in noises up to 4 s long. Unbeknownst to listeners, some noise samples reoccurred randomly throughout an experimental block. Results showed that repeated exposure induced learning for otherwise totally unpredictable and meaningless sounds. The learning was unsupervised and resilient to interference from other task-relevant noises. When memories were formed, they emerged rapidly, performance became abruptly near-perfect, and multiple noises were remembered for several weeks. The acoustic transformations to which recall was tolerant suggest that the learned features were local in time. We propose that rapid sensory plasticity could explain how the auditory brain creates useful memories from the ever-changing, but sometimes repeating, acoustical world.»

Age and familiarity effects on musical memory

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0305969

@jrareform I like to know who you been working with. Look into some of the white papers and presentations by Pete Millett for instance. Pete is able to tune the levels of even and odd harmonics in his amplifier designs to get solid state like bass and tube like midrange and high frequency contours. Hopefully this is not the first time you hear the name Nelson Pass and are familiar with what he has done with Single Ended solid state amplifiers and his latest SIT designs and how they attempt to replicate Single Ended Triode (SET) amplification. The team at Valvet in Germany also has similar designs.

BUT, amplifier designs was not what I was addressing. What I was referring to is that I own and have specialized professional high-end mastering equipment here at home that will allow me to use as tools, both in the analog and digital domain, to tune and dial in the resultant sound to sound like I want it to. Sound, and that is any and all sound, has three elements: frequency, amplitude, and temporal phase. Any signal going through any electronic device or set of electronic devices can be characterized by the device’s or system of device’  transfer function and those transfer functions can be adjusted by dynamic convolution either at their inputs or at the outputs. 

By the way, if you get a chance listen to a First Watt F2J solid-state amplifier and hear how it compares with a Directly Heated Triode (DHT) Single Ended Amplifier (SET) for instance.

There are professional audio processing systems and devices that digitally replicate the sound of analog audio equipment and by analog I mean either tube, solid-state, and hybrid technologies. The emulation takes into account non-linearities associated with the changes in the sound when the amplifiers are driven harder, this is something traditional linear convolution technologies cannot accurately replicate. Just look at the guitar amplifier world where this is now common practice.

You would not believe what is possible today and with AI and Quantum Computing fast coming to the forefront there will be nothing that cannot be achieved.

BUT, amplifier designs was not what I was addressing. What I was referring to is that I own and have specialized professional high-end mastering equipment here at home that will allow me to use as tools,

@carlos269 You probably should have stated this in your opening post.  Many of us are component oriented to build sonic audio chains to our subjective preferences.  I’m pursuing top notch solid state amplification performance- lower noise floor, increased sonic performance (leading and trailing edge of notes…), engagement (emotionally drawn into the music).  It was confusing because SS can be detailed and warm.