DISCLAIMER: These are my personal opinions and may or may not represent the opinions of other folks here at Emotiva (unless otherwise noted).
As a company, we tend to be of the "live and let live" and "if you want it we'll make it" attitude on most things.
Tubes:
Some of you who read a lot of my posts may be surprised to learn that I've owned at least 50 pieces of tube gear in my lifetime - mostly amplifiers (probably a lot more).
I first learned about audio gear in high school - mostly on tube gear.
(Tube gear was on the way out by then - but my high school electronics teacher really liked it.)
I have an extensive background in designing and building tube gear, and used to purchase, repair, and sell it.
I find tube gear interesting; and I find both the technology and the implementations cool.
However, that said, in my experience, tube preamps tend to introduce at least SOME coloration to the sound, and tube power amps ALWAYS introduce a LOT of coloration to the sound.
I also happen to be a firm believer that "the job of high fidelity equipment is to reproduce the original signal as accurately as possible - with as little coloration as possible".
Therefore, while I find tube equipment fun to design and play with, I DO NOT consider it to truly qualify as "high fidelity", and have no desire to listen to it.
And, yes, I have occasionally felt nostalgic, and purchased or borrowed a piece of tube gear to listen to.
But, every single time I have listened to a piece of tube gear, I have found it to sound "novel" or "interesting", but less accurate than good quality solid state gear.
(I've heard one or two tube preamps which were pretty much indistinguishable from good solid state gear - but then why bother?)
Vinyl:
I was raised before CDs existed - and used to own lots of vinyl albums.
I find that vinyl albums always seem to exhibit a lot of colorations associated with the recording and playback process.
(I'm not going to take the time or space to list them here.... but it's a long list.)
In some cases I find these interesting; in others not; but I rarely if ever find them preferable to the uncolored sound of a good quality digital recording.
When I was younger, I found the "ritual of getting out the record, carefully cleaning it, and gently lowering the tone-arm" to be somewhat fun, but - even then - also mildly annoying.
However, even then, I found the uncertainty very problematic (put that tone arm down and hope you didn't hear a scratch or noise that wasn't there the last time you played that album).
Nowadays I just consider vinyl to be a nuisance....
(And, if I find something where the original vinyl version really sounds better, I'll make a digital copy of it and get the best of both...)
And, yes, there are some really poor sounding digital recordings.
However, to be totally fair, vinyl aficionados seem to forget that, back before CDs existed, there were also some really awful sounding vinyl albums too (and there are a few new ones that are bad too).
Cables:
I put this into a different category than the other two - because, for the most part, it is NOT simply a subjective matter of personal preference.
(Unlike with vinyl, or tubes, we're not talking about a difference which is obviously real, and can be measured, but which some people simply prefer.)
From an engineering perspective, the vast majority of "fancy cables" are purest snake oil... and there is simply no technical merit whatsoever to the claims made for many of them.
There are in fact a few situations where certain differences between cables may result in small but audible differences.
However, even then, they tend to be simply differences, rather than improvements.
(Buying an expensive cable because it causes a 0.5 dB in treble roll-off seems like a bad investment in a remarkably overpriced tone control to me.)
(And, no, if a fancy cable really did prevent your music from being degraded by a time blur, you would be able to measure and document the difference.)
In case you're wondering - I voted the third choice.
