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Return of the Vacuum Tube
sciencehabit writes "Peer inside an antique radio and you'll find what look like small light bulbs. They're actually vacuum tubes — the predecessors of the silicon transistor. Vacuum tubes went the way of the dinosaurs in the 1960s, but researchers have now brought them back to life, creating a nano-sized version that's faster and hardier than the transistor (abstract). It's even able to survive the harsh radiation of outer space."
Most expensive, maybe, but best? Not if your goal is a transparent amplifier: one that takes an input, and reproduces that output as accurately as possible with a higher amplitude. Valves suck at this. An entire branch of mathematics (control theory) was developed to compensate for the horrendous non-linearities of vacuum tubes.
You may like the distortions produced by tube amps (or transistor amps outputting those same distortions via DSP), but don't pretend they're better at reproducing sound. They are demonstrably not.