Tubes Tubes

[Grant Richter]

Would someone be kind enough to explain why tube
circuitry is preferable for audio over solid state?
I realize this has probably been beat to death
on ault.audio.hifi but is there a short explanation?

I mean if two different circuits which are linear gain stages,
both amplifying the same signal and one sounds
different from the other, then one is non-linear,
or they are both non-linear in different ways.
It seems to me to be a case of the circuit failing to follow
the mathematical prediction of the circuit action.
Now this can be a good thing, but is what sense is
it failing? And which one fails in which way?

At the time solid state was taking over for tubes,
the best explanation I heard, which only applied to
large power amps, was that during peak clipping,
a tube amplifier would clip with a perfect square
corner which produced only odd harmonic distortion.
A transistor amp would go into "soft clipping" which was
waveform rounding and mathematically produced
inharmonic partials like a ring modulator.

Is that true? 

Thanks for the background.


----------
> From: Paul Maddox <Paul.Maddox at unilever.com>
> To: synthdiy <synth-diy at mailhost.bpa.nl>
> Subject: Tubes Tubes
> Date: Monday, December 13, 1999 2:17 AM
> 
> All,
> 
>   Found this, looked kinda like fun...
> 
> http://www.clarkson.edu/~stokessd/dac.html
> 
>   A DAC useing a tube...
> 
>   Paul
> 
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