vacuum tubes are so misunderstood in the audio community. silly forums only propagate poor information without context and leave novices with the impression that amps with tubes sound worse than solid state amps when in fact they both are good for their own purposes. for my purposes, i havent heard a single solid state amp come close to a 3 watt monoblock pair of amps i salvaged from a vintage akai reel to reel player. i have modified it heavily but it has gone up against $10k solid state amps and come out on top. yes, tubes add distortion but not all distortion is bad. it is very difficult to understand this without having lived with tubes for a while. if you build an amp with them, things become clearer much faster.