I have several pieces of audio equipment with tubes, and I firmly believe that a tube renaissance is upon us. There’s so much more warmth and depth to audio when using old school methods. That said, I never considered myself someone with exceptional ears, but I can absolutely tell a difference with lossless audio.
I remember in the 90s when MP3s started popping up around the Internet, I thought it was so cool that we could compress audio to the point it was retrievable over dialup. CDA files as found on CDs back then were very large compared to the ~1 MB per minute of early MP3 audio. With FLAC, the sizes are much larger, but the highs are not clipped, and the lower parts of the spectrum are less muddy.
I use a Schiit USB DAC and tube amplifier on my computer with Beyerdynamic semi-open back studio monitors, FWIW. USB isn’t pristine, but it’s got enough bandwidth to support the audio spectrum.
Where do you get the “tube” equipment repaired? We have a player, but it’s broken.