Other amplifiers have their own characteristic sound - and these become as distinct in guitar circles as a clarinet, flute and french horn would be in an orchestra.
No doubt a guitar amplifier is part of the instrument, but my point was to try to correlate things both audiophiles and guitar players say about tubes. They say things like tube amps are "more open and spacious", "round and dynamic", "super crisp", "organic", with lots of "bite, chime and presence".
In my video I think I managed to decipher at least two of those attributes: "round and dynamic". In fact, the transition from a linear to a non-linear transfer curve on a triode class A amplifier is very gradual (round), and (most astonishingly to me) the transfer curve under distortion changes its shape with the level of the input (dynamic). This is because the tube changes its operating point, as the input coupling capacitor gets negatively charged by the forward conduction of the grid.
Why this may be important? Well, tubes sound great, but they are bulky, fragile, power hungry, expensive. Although tube amp modeling is an activity that's been going on for decades now, I thought I'd investigate it myself. The effect I described above is not trivial to reproduce with analog solid state, I guess. Maybe with DSP.
This is just a tiny aspect. As I stated in the video, I do not believe that just a single tube is capable of giving back the "tube sound". It is a result of a lot of factors. The thumbnail is there to prove. Chet is in his home recording studio. The audio is not only intended to be reproduced using tubes. It's being
recorded using tubes. Everything there is tubey and analog. I even think his striped cardigan has something to do with the sound. But that would be the subject for another video.