Guess it means something different to everybody. My def'n is similar to Feanor/E-stats, only because this is what I absorbed from older, wiser, more experienced people who were using the word "warm" to describe sound before I was even spelling.

I grew up in the SS era. Consequently whenever I hear tube "warmth" it sounds decidedly unnatural, nothing at all like what I hear at live shows or even what my band or I sound like with guitar, piano, amplified or acoustic in pretty much any venue I've ever played or visited. Not just warm sounding tube gear either...warm sounding anything. How warm ever got linked to "natural" is the greatest audio mystery of the universe to this guy.

Yet I recognize a tremendous amount of people would suggest otherwise. Mostly a generation or two older than me, though I've met the rare few (even several on this site) that disagree with me as well.

To me warm has always been boring, the life sucked out of the highs and artificially injected into the lower mids. Also when I think warm, I thing sleepy, tiring, bloated, heavy - I find it often accompanies the pleasant harmonic distortions some tube amps are noted for - there's a cause and effect somewhere. I've never understood the appeal. There's been a lot of tube amps and other gear described as "warm" that I've really, really liked, but it seems to be in spite of "warmth". Certainly my latest amp is a bit more on the warm side compared to the more in your face Adcom or Rotel stuff I had. Maybe my hearing and tastes are changing?

It's frustrating as hell sometimes going through life as an audio heretic, loving gear others would describe with words such as "cold", "bright", "harsh", or my personal fav..."analytical". Language is a funny thing - I'm a believer words "mean something". It's almost offensive to me when they're used to convey different meanings than is almost universally accepted. Guess I'll have to deal with it. I have feeling some of these words aren't intended to be offensive, but then again, sometimes they are.

Too bad we all couldn't just simplify things and stick to using words like "good", "better" and "bad". That's more my speed.