Anyone else evolve beyond tubes?

The mu-vista tubes in the MF A5 do not have haze, grain, slowness or frequency anomalies whatsoever...it may be the best CD player available...beats my Wadia 860 and ML 390s! I recently heard the ARC ref setup with Watt Puppy 8's...ok but not great..still tube haze present! Maybe some combination of tube amp/preamp would not color the music so much. Just thought it was interesting that the Mcintosh stuff is so grain free and rich in timbre...very dynamic as well.

Umm but it doesn’t get rid of the tubes. So you still need them even though you’re using a SS amp. I have a T-amp and really like it for lower listening levels (bedroom system). But my main 2 channel system is all tubes. I really like it better than any of the SS amps that I have used.

What really matters is DO YOU LIKE IT? Unless you’re chasing the dog, when it sounds great to you, then sit and listen.

I really think that room acoustics far outweighs any hi end mod you can do with equipment however. I have heard some under 1000.00 systems sound better than 10000.00 systems by room arrangements and good attention to sound materials. In fact the funniest blind test I attended was a comparison between two SS amps; a 150.00 pioneer verses a Mark Levinson ML2. Most people enjoyed the smooth midrange of the pioneer!? But liked the overall detail of the Mark Levinson. It blew me away. But actually it was how the room was laid out and the materials used that allowed the lesser amp to sound well beyond its price and build range. I thought it was a SS amp pitted against a lesser tube amp.

Eggs ackley my friend..the room, the power.. everything matters..enjoy!!

Dave_b , Well a tube in a source is virtually the same as running a tube pre.. I mean truth is you are just implementing tube sound in different component but same upstream fashon. I Say if you can get a tube output stage on a CD player with volume control, then yes it is very possible to have just as good of a musical sound sense as running a Tube pre or an amp.. I definatley believe in solid state amps being better for my taste, lots of air and punch, with power in reserve. Tube amps top out faster and the more you turn them up sometimes the softer they can get unless you can go into big dollar mono's with tons of tubes and heat, so I guess with the original statement of for the cost implemented yes solid state circuitry today especially in amplifiers can be just as enjoyable as tubes. However I still believe tubes in the chain either at the source or the preamp are a good option, and needed in many cases. I would go try a CD or Dac Tubed if I did not need a phono source, but thats why running a tube pre is still necessary in my case, otherwise I could get away with all solid state counterpart I guess.

All my gear is solid state. Lots of slam, and dunk, and hiss sort of like bacon frying, which is like napalm in the morning as Robert Duval said.