Not sure if you knew this or not but Russian composer Scriabin explored and had theories on different sounds being associated with certain colors
I didn't know that. (And I used to listen to a lot of Scriabin).
I wonder if he was subject to synesthesia or chromesthesia.
I did a thread about this a while back - the possible relationship between those phenomena and audiophiles:
Synesthesia: https://www.livescience.com/61930-synesthesia-hear-colors-genes.html About 4 percent of the people on Earth experience a mysterious phenomenon called synesthesia: They hear a sound and automatically see a color; or, they read a certain word, and a specific hue enters their mind's...
www.audiosciencereview.com
As I mention in that thread, lots of audiophiles have equated sonic attributes to "colors" and I tend to "see" color in sound. And since this thread is about tube sound, to detour in to a more controversial idea...
There is a coloration that I have always perceived from my CJ tube gear. It's a sort of golden glowy amber tone in the upper mids/lower treble. Every time, especially when using both my CJ tube and amp together, the sound just has this "golden slightly lit up glow." And when I go back and forth between solid state and my CJ amps, it's very much this "golden glow" that tips me off as to which is which (and it's what I heard when I blind tested my CJ tube amp against my Benchmark preamp).
Which makes it interesting to me to find other audiophiles trying to describe what they hear citing the same attribute in many of the older CJ reviews, for instance:
Fremer on the CJ Premier 12s:
....the midrange were carefully accomplished, though the upper midrange exhibited a rich, golden bloom—a sonic bouquet—too subtle to be called a coloration but sufficiently pronounced to enrich brass, strings, female voices, alto sax, and hall ambience with an intoxicating glow.
Jonathan Valin reviewing a modern CJ amp, but contrasting it to the old CJ sound:
There is none of the “golden brown” coloration that tended to make c-j electronics sound the way bronzed baby shoes look,
Now of course I know that for many here that just goes in to the category of flowery b.s, and yes I understand that (please see my signature lin). But, man, those guys described precisely what I percieve in my old CJ amps - it's one of the defining characteristics that keeps them in my system. When I see other audiophiles or reviewers who manage to describe sound in a way that suggests they "hear it as I do" I find that really cool (and their reviews can lead me to discover other gear that I end up really liking too).
And it also, to my mind, speaks to the OPs question as to why I still use tube amps.