I'm not angry. I have 2 ears and a brain, no oscilliscope. I don't watch the tubes glow, I tend to look at the fireplace.
The sound of live performance is the gold standard. Some recordings are certainly far better than others. No type of amplifier will transform a poor recording into a verisimilitude of a live performance. But, I have found excellent recordings which come close when played through my 5wpc SET tube amp and Axiom speakers (or Axiom made speakers like the Michauras).
Now, such recordings when played through some excellent solid state amplifiers (Odyssey, Yamaha M80 first 30 watts in pure class A, Integra M504) also sound wonderful, just a subtle bit less so, in my opinion.
On the other hand, M100s and the Odyssey Khartago SE, and tube preamap, and Thiel CS3.6s and the Integra M504 have also lit me up pretty good.
Your 2 ears and brain may come to a different conclusion.
Bottom line, joy from music!
Joy from music is a good thing. Telling people one amp sounds better than another, when you know which amp is in the system, has been proven time and time again under blind tests to be lacking in credibility. This does not make you a bad person. You are just espousing bad science.
Stereophile refuses to do blind tests for the same reason: They know that all their talk about "this amp has more bloom when reproducing Classic Guitar than did that amp" would be shown to be nothing more than bias.
You are biased in regards to amps. That's OK. Almost everyone is.
I have participated in over 50 blind amp tests, the first being in 1980. In EVERY test, differences well meaning audiophiles could hear when he/she knew which amp was playing disappeared when the test was blind.
On Home Theater Shack last year, an extensive blind test was done with I believe 8 listeners. In the test, one guy "got it right" 5 out of 7 times. But another "got it wrong" 5 out of 7", and at the end of the test, if one adds up the results, the guys were guessing.
