Hi, I have no experience regarding the gear you are thinking about. I do love tube sound and almost all of my designs are all tubes. (a few things like SS rectifiers though). My sense is that since the media that goes into DAC is digital I would personally opt for a digital DAC with a clean audio section. It could be either SS or tube. Each has positive and negative aspects. It is ironic that the DAC I use has settings to "make it sound like a tube unit". After listening to all the choices I chose another one. I'm not sure what they were trying to do but the clean output variations sounded better. If you can hear the units you are thinking about it would be best, an alternative is a try before you buy arrangement (yes I know fairly rare). Otherwise it is kind of a crap shoot. No two folks have the same ears and yours are the ones that matter in this case.