One of the many things I have learned over the years when it comes to audio is that sometimes you just need to say: If you're happy and it sounds good to you, that's all that matters. Different rooms, different music choices, different experiences, they all contribute to us hearing "differently". It's akin to me saying that I prefer German sports cars (Porsche's in particular) to anything else out there, but someone may prefer an Italian exotic, or doing back-road peel outs in a classic American muscle car. All different, but all equally valid.
I'm into vinyl today because I've always been into vinyl. I grew up with it and never left. Yes, I did pick up a CD player sometime in the late 80's, but I never stopped playing or buying LPs. One big benefit when I was in high-school and university is that the CD age brought with it a slew of people dumping their record collections for pennies, so it was easy to buy 20 used LPs for the price of a single new CD. That in turn exposed me to all kinds of music that I had never experienced before, expanding my musical knowledge and understanding of completely new genres. It also allowed me to amass a 15k+ collection that takes up an entire room of our house!
The physical aspect of record cover artwork, putting an LP on the turntable, brushing the stylus and record, and cueing up the lead-in groove are all tangible things and we are connected to them, so I believe we listen more closely, with more concentration compared to picking out the latest track and pressing play on a streaming App.
I also understand the technical deficiencies of vinyl, tubes, etc. better than most people, and frankly I don't care much. LPs and tubes have far higher distortion than digital and solid-state in almost all cases. I can measure it and I can hear it. But the much more benign even order distortion, crosstalk, etc. is much easier to audibly swallow than odd-order harmonics or digital compression.
That being said, I do firmly believe that loudspeakers should accurately portray that distortion, that noise, those imperfections. I'm not a fan of EQ, filters and tone controls, and I don't want that in a loudspeaker that has a flavor or colors the sound. Upstream, I know I'm listening to vinyl, and I want my loudspeakers to portray that as clearly as if I am streaming something on Tidal.
One final point about tubes: I have no issues using them in small-signal applications such as in phono stages or pre-amps. While tubes cannot be as quiet in those applications as the best solid-state, they can perform very will with distortion below the limits of audibility. Amplifiers, however, are a different matter. The output transformers used on most tube amplifiers interact directly with the loudspeaker electrically, causing variations in frequency response that will depend on each specific amp and speaker pairing. That leads me back to wanting my loudspeakers to be free of tone controls and a tube amp connected to a loudspeaker is exactly that.
At the end of the day, enjoy yourself! Music is FUN!
Andrew
