My opinion on the "failings" of yester-decade's gear is if those
characteristics were desirable, why isn't anybody listening to wax
cylinders on hand cranked phonographs? After all, the motorized, tube
amplified, voice coil driven sound of the 30's was an evolution of that.
While that is true, its a simple fact that no-one is listening to 30's technology around here. The list of improvements is much to long to list here- and I'm sure you are aware of them.
...The hardest thing I've had to do is learn to
listen for what distortion is. That has brought me into strong agreement
with the belief that dynamics are closely associated with distortion.
+1
IMO/IME, about 95% of the time when audiophiles use the word 'dynamics' they are really talking about distortion and that word can be safely substituted into the conversation without changing its meaning.
The reason this is so is because the ear uses the higher ordered harmonics to sense sound pressure (GE demonstrated this in the 1960s but little was done with that research). This is probably due to the fact that pure sine wave tones don't exist in nature.
Its right at this point that our philosophies about how to get good sound probably differ; I am of the opinion that since our ears are so sensitive to these harmonics that its not a good idea to do anything design-wise to generate them and so specifically avoid doing that in our designs. This means that I don't use feedback because feedback, while suppressing distortion, also adds some of its own, and all of higher ordered harmonics which can be easily heard. So if I can do a design that does not make those harmonics, it will be smoother and not sound 'loud'.
I've been accused of using 'antiquated' technology in this regard and that is true, but SITs were a short-lived technology in the 1970s and there were no small signal and driver devices that were SITs- only outputs. Regular transistors just don't have the linearity **and** soft clipping to do the job. That is why tubes are still around BTW; if really inferior (and not just antiquated) they would have been gone long ago.