my first-hand experience is a dubious claim of what exactly?
i said tube amps distort at high gains. It’s physics.
It produces harmonics. Again, this is physics.
tube amps sound different from solid-state amps. see above.
I LIKE the sound that it produces…a subjective statement.
so which exactly do you wish to apply science?
fyi, a statistically valid experiment requires at least 30 samples, not a sample of one. Also, the “experiments“ I normally see here are the dubious ones. many if not all experiments here made no attempts at all to identify the experimental design or even whether it is a single-factor or not. No consideration given to extraneous variables, or interactions among variables…what variables are held-constant, allowed to vary, etc. No blocking,
no randomization…nothing. It’s oftentimes a sample of one with uncalibrated instruments, often devoid of references to measuring instrument limitations, etc. No stat analysis (which is a bit hard to do with one sample!). So please spare me all the bull. I suggest if you really are too serious abt experiments and all, read Design and Analysis of Experiments (Montgomery). Now, listening to headphones doesn’t need to be all that serious. Music is the one that should be enjoyed, not experiments.
The problem is, people have tried to demonstrate what you claim for decades, but fail. While you are apparently cooling your heels, read this.
In 1980 Dan Shanefield and High Fidelity magazine startled the American audio community with a double blind amplifier comparison test in which listeners failed to identify power amplifiers by sound alone. Battle lines were quickly drawn and the controversy over whether amplifiers sounded...
www.aes.org
Or if you don't want to purchase the article you can read the summary table.
Do partially-sighted speaker faceoffs tally well with blind test results? If they can be shown to tally well then we we can trust many comparisons - anyone can do a face off (and many do...), while blind tests are too tricky for most to attempt. Example: Audio Musings by Sean Olive A blog...
www.audiosciencereview.com
These are large studies of populations of people attempting to tell amps apart, and they can't. A properly working tube amp is absolutely indistinguishable from any other properly working amp.
Also, tubes producing pleasing harmonics (i.e. even ones) is another myth, perhaps you might not understand, but harmonics are measurable.
There are multiple distortion tests to see how much distortion you actually can detect, and even software that actually produces all sorts of different harmonic distortion, and it is kind of eye-opening to see how insensitive to the harmonics you think you are hearing we actually are, and how loud the harmonics have to be to detectable. Then, if you compare to the actual measured distortion of an amp, you will quickly see that no way you are hearing what you think.
www.klippel.de
distortaudio.org
PKHarmonic 1.0 is the initial release of this software. Use at your own risk!
distortaudio.org
As starting points, you will be shocked at how high distortion has to be to hear it, and how bad it sounds when you can.
ASR has lots of information on how we actually hear (ears are not useful at measuring) and how our hearing actually causes us to imagine and as you say hallucinate, but not in the way you are thinking.
Lastly, you are lecturing a physics professor who is quite an expert on tubes, owns and builds (among other things), and the very topic you are lecturing about... Physics. I'm also a physicist who owns and builds amps (although mostly solid state, and not as nice as SIY). You know nothing about physics.
