Sorry... musicians can tell the difference; so there has to be something. As it is generally their preference upon which the source material is built, I'm sure that some... ahem... critical listeners can tell the difference, just as you and I can tell the difference between a square wave and a sine wave played through a loudspeaker.
I will accept this if it is being proven through double-blind testing. If you don't test properly, it's like trying to measure PSU ripple with the scope in DC mode.
There are so many layers of insecurity, poser factor distortion, copy-cat-ism and general cargo cultism in the musician -- electronics interface that only the most stringent scientific method appliaction can distinguish opinion from fact.
There are lots of differences that are obvious and measure easily, that is not what I am talking about here. For instance the distortion qualities of hollow vs solid state; the various ways to connect valves being used in amplifiers have influence, and so on and so forth. This is all common knowledge. I for instance am much in favour of "british" eq solutions like the ones from Neve, SSL, Tac Amek and so on. They might not have the impressive feature set presented by say a Yamaha mixing desk, but what there is, is actually useful. A friend of mine, one of Sweden's most known live sound engineers, once said "The Yamaha PM3000 input channel EQ can make a kick drum sound like anything. Except a kick drum." All of this is traceable to good vs uninspired circuit design using actual, applied EE knowledge. And it translates to definite preferences. (Before you ask, the good circuits sometimes have NE5532 instead of TL072, and the transistors are mostly BC550/560, but that's about it. The good stuff is good because it is done right, like the Fernseh gear that was mentioned. Good even on a bad day.)
It is easy to confuse those two situations with each other. And as soon as we do that, we have a problem. Not because there are preferences, but because the exaggerated preferences are being used as a pretext by the unscrupulous to mislead the insecure and take their money. And that, IMNSHO, is immoral. And my main gripe with the 'phool culture.
Yes, but that was exactly the point I was trying to make... obviously
real audiophile culture has a handle on what is real vs what is not; this
is qualifiable, altho not
always quantifiable in the way
some technically-minded folks insist it must be to be real.
It's kindof a self-fulfilling argument in many cases; and is a large part of the back & forth we're talking about here. If you don't believe that there can possibly be a difference between how a particular brand/model of tube makes music sound vs another, then how can you possibly expect to design a suitable test bed?None of us here would dare argue with C and Mans that the Von Neumann mic/tube amp is a definitively superior input device
as a whole, and clearly the tube amp is as important as the transducer itself. This is down to
both the choobs selected and the circuit design.Now... before you dogpile me here, let me finish my train of thought. 
Knowing that there are two parts to this amplifier's pedigree, when we evaluate the "audiophool cult" claim that the Amperex Bugle Boy choob which is the subject of so much argument here sounds better, we must
also evaluate that
when used in the amplifiers designed around it, which are supposedly the "audio standard" that real audiophiles are trying to achieve or at least emulate, and which we have large bodies of legitimate, empirical evidence they most certainly do sound better.Okay... once we are at this point... we have to step back and take a look at human nature. As with anything, when you have something that has a demand and associated high pricetag for being "high performance" or "for the discriminating customer", you are going to have all manner of wannabes and posers who want to be thought of that way, but cannot or will not spend the money for the real thing delivered by a reputable source.
Of course, whenever you have a situation where there is an abundance of money to be made and uninformed wannabes to separate from their money, you will have an equal abundance of unscrupulous people willing to help them in their desire to
believe they can be part of that aspirational group for whatever money they have to spend, and
as long as the money holds out, there will an ever-expanding market of different products to suit every budget and actual knowledge level.An example... aftermarket wheels for your "sporty car". Back in the day, Halibrand mags were
the shit; of course, there soon followed a whole slew of other similar products turned out to capture a slice of that market. Before long, Cragar SS chromed steel wheels became a name in their own right, then after them even lower quality products, right down to painted "wagon wheels" for those who just wanted a wheel to put fat tires on, and for those who couldn't even afford or couldn't be arsed, cheap chromed plastic hubcaps to make even your station wagon look sporty.
For you youngsters, think Cadillac with gold-plated spinners vs Escort with plastic spinner hubcapzz... 
Okay... so... with this in mind, we have to evaluate the amplifiers in question similarly.A properly designed choob amp, using parts and circuit the same as those amplifiers which real audiophiles have determined do sound better, may very well indeed sound "better" with the Bugle Boy
jeans err.... choobs. I'm not fit to judge personally, especially after decades of listening to everything from Deep Purple to 21 Pilots with the volume up to 11.
But I'm also not dumb; I realize that there are going to be a whole slew of people willing to capitalize on the notoriety of that choob and that amplifier, and there will be everything from high-quality, legitimate attempts to recreate that amplifier, using the correct genuine choobs, and the correct circuit with modern equivalent passives components, to counterfeit choobs, counterfeit amplifiers using those counterfeit choobs, and a whole ecology of stuff out there running the gamut right down to "high-impedance choob headphone amplifiers" where there is
one choob, and the only thing live in it is a LED underneath making the thing glow. -group-therapy-thread/?action=dlattach;attach=1021934;image)
Every one of these products, from the ridiculous to the sublime, are capitalizing on the notoriety of this one choob we just want for to keep our wiggle-scopes alive and as close to original as possible. Yes, there are a lot of them that cannot possibly utilize whatever "awesome sauce" may or may not be in those choobs. But to use these fraudulent products as an excuse to dismiss the notoriety of that tube/amplifier across the board is actually a very similar logic to the ages old argument of "Meh... a Camry gets you from point A to point B just the same as a Ferarri, so why spend the money on the Ferrari...?"
Under any circumstances, it really does not matter. We're talking about supply/demand here; for whatever reasons, these particular choobs are expensive. The constant bitching about it is not going to change that; it's all just "sour grapes" driven scapegoating because we don't want to spend the money.We have no problem with the expense of Dalibor's ginormous nixies; but most of us accept the fact we aren't willing to spend that kind of money to make a fucking clock. We really need to come to a similar acceptance of the fact that this particular choob, whether we like it or not, is also fucking expensive due to simple supply and demand, and that fact is is part of "the cost of doing business" in our particular hobby.
I hate the fact that all the cars I owned as a kid and sold off "to get the next one in line" are now worth tens of thousands of dollars apiece where they were once "just old cars", so my teenage hobby of buying and fixing them up is no longer within my reach. I hate the fact that hobby has also been taken over by wannabes and automo-phoolz with more money than sense or actual knowledge.
I get that we don't like this. But FFS, it's just
a handful of choobs out of dozens we might need. And we actually have alternate parts to use; it's
only the assache and expense of procuring them that we keep rehashing over and over again.
At least for my car-building hobby, the hunt for parts was actually part of "the thing". 
I spent my time trawling boneyards and many meets at Hershey Park looking for this valance panel or that headlight bezel or a bumper in rebuildable condition; I see these choobs as another variant of
exactly that phenomenon. The hunt is the very thing which makes this still a hobby, rather than the nearly exclusive domain of professional restoration shops and Mecum's, as my old musclecar hobby has become.
mnem
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