Tubes (valves) are still the best.

[Rogue Physicist]

If you love audio and music, and you love tube gear, I do too!
So I am willing to chat about audio electronics and tubes, if you have any questions or want to talk circuits, just post it here!

[Daravon]

Tubes sound subjectively better because they soft clip and generate more distortion than SS components. Whether this sounds better on not is purely subjective.

[scigg]

Is it an electronics (http://www.electronicsee.com) question?

[Harmonic]

Having lived in the real world where all the electronic devices were at one time tube based, I can conceive of only a few applications where they are needed today.

Whether the audio harmonic distortion introduced by tube based electronic circuits is more aesthetically pleasing than the output from solid-state devices is a matter of conjecture.

Electrical waveforms representing audio emissions have to be converted into oscillatory vibrations into the atmosphere, and these devices introduce their own limitations. The ultimate arbitrator of audio quality is human hearing, and it varies over a wide scale.

The glow of white hot plates of high power transmitting tubes and the blue glow of gas based rectifier tubes was an impressive sight, but they wore out and had to be periodically replaced. Solid-state power amps and rectifiers just keep going, and going.