Tuners: Once I started doing level-matched comparisons (sighted), I quickly found that there wasn't much sonic difference between good tuners in terms of "musicality", whether solid state or tube. But what does matter are matters of sensitivity, selectivity, and the quality of the noise they generate under less than ideal reception conditions.
In many ways, I felt that the old Sony XDR-F1HD was king of the hill, but under marginal reception conditions, mine would constantly switch between digital and analog signal which I found distracting, and there was no provision for locking it onto one or the other, perhaps a limitation of the ASIC they used.