alt Hacker NewsAs a guitarist with over 30 years of playing, and owner of many tube and non-tube amps, I disagree. Even experienced guitarist cannot reliably distinguish between transistor and tube circuits in a blind test. Having said that, if only the knowledge of playing a tube amp gives someone a better experience, even if its not empirically distinguishable, thats a perfectly valid reason to prefer it.
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Minor correction:
An experienced guitarist cannot distinguish between "captured" amps, or amps which at their core simulate vacuum tubes at the software level. I definitely can't tell the two apart. However, I believe it is easy to distinguish a pure vacuum tube-based circuit from a JFET/MOSFET-based one.
There do exist vacuum tube replacements like the AMT 12AX7WS [1] or Jet City's RetroVales [2], but I would argue that the fact that they try to emulate tubes via transistors is a strong indicator that the natural circuits for both sound distinct enough for guitarists.
[1] https://amtelectronics.com/new/amt-12ax7ws/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190803060713/http://www.robert...
Maybe recently, with impulse responses and Fractal Axes-like machines, you can get any sound from silicon. But in the 90's the difference between silicon guitarrists (Dimebag Darrell or Chuck Schuldiner) and tubes was clearly noticeable.
Also, some 90's lower end amps with a valve in the prev sounded way better than similar priced amps that opted for pure solid state, at least for metal music and high distortion. For the clean channel the difference between them was minor.