Tube amps under $7500


Ready to experiment with combinations never before (or not recently) tried. Step one requires a tube amp. Now looking at Prima Luna EVO 400 which sells for 5K. Any other tube amps I should consider in this price/feature range? Must come in silver with balanced input. For pairing experimentally with various tube and SS preamps. Efficient 4 ohm Legacy speakers (and the room/setup) are the constants.

 

hickamore

The MC275 is a great amp once you throw away the junk OEM tubes. Which should he done with immediacy IMHO.

@mdalton 

Bi-Amping is the way, at least for me.

I have two mono-blocked MC275s (running GEC A2900s and KR Audio KT88s or GEC KT88s depending on any  given day) up top and a pair of Pass Labs xa160.8 mono-blocks down under. I love how they sound together.

Speakers are BW 802D4s.

 

@larryi I'm told that many tube users are switching to Coda SS amps. Extended bottom end is a necessity for me.
@mdalton Sounds optimal, but how do you manage level matching, etc.?

"Sounds optimal, but how do you manage level matching, etc.?"

@hickamore 

If you're referring to gain matching different amps in a bi-amped setup, I do it with my McIntosh MEN2200 Room Correction System vis a vis its low/high pass filters/outputs as it allows me to adjust output gain between them. 

I'm sure there are all sorts of opinions on the right or wrong way to do this, but thus far it has worked quite well for me.

For me, it is not just that extremely deep and impactful bass is a low priority, I don't like the results I often hear with attempts to achieve such bass.  Often the bottom end sounds "dry" and toneless when that kind of bass is achieved.  I think it is quite hard to do proper active crossovers and bi-amplification and even adding subwoofers properly is tricky.  The bass quality of your speaker system is mostly a property of the speaker, not the amplification.  While it is possible to get some improvement by proper choice of amplifier, and perhaps by expert bi-amplification, I think it would be hard to avoid compromises in other aspects of performance or ease of use of the system.  I know people who constantly fiddle with subwoofer settings, bi-amplification level setting, etc., and that sort of attention to the system is not for me.  Some people enjoy that kind of tweaking, so it is a personal choice.