My Father was running a tubed preamp with an SS power amp as was suggested to him by a few folks. I had always thought that his system sounded like hell i.e. the lower mids were always muddy sounding, bass was bloated and ill-defined, treble was sibilant and hard sounding, etc... He somehow thought that this sounded good. I kept telling him how bad it sounded but he just laughed and thought i was crazy. Quite honestly, i had always blamed his speakers for the "muck" that i heard but i was about to be proven wrong.
A while back, his tubed preamp went down i let him borrow one of my spare SS preamps while i fixed his. Viola, the sonic problems that i had noted were solved and the system sounded 10X more transparent with the SS preamp in the system. I don't know if the sonic problems were created by an impedance mismatch between preamp and amp or if the tubes were funky ( he had tried a couple different types of tubes ), but whatever it was, it didn't matter any more. My Dad was so hung up on what the reviewers and salesmen had said that he was convinced that he "HAD" to have tubes somewhere in the system. After that experience, he no longer lays claims to tubes sounding "better" than SS. In fact, my Mother referred to the tube preamp as "a piece of junk" after hearing the differences between it and the SS piece.
The moral of this story is to use what you like and what gives you the performance / features that you seek. I'm sure that you can find something that will work excellently for you. I would not worry about the method ( tubes or SS ) to achieve those goals, but simply that the components get you to where you want to go. Sean
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A while back, his tubed preamp went down i let him borrow one of my spare SS preamps while i fixed his. Viola, the sonic problems that i had noted were solved and the system sounded 10X more transparent with the SS preamp in the system. I don't know if the sonic problems were created by an impedance mismatch between preamp and amp or if the tubes were funky ( he had tried a couple different types of tubes ), but whatever it was, it didn't matter any more. My Dad was so hung up on what the reviewers and salesmen had said that he was convinced that he "HAD" to have tubes somewhere in the system. After that experience, he no longer lays claims to tubes sounding "better" than SS. In fact, my Mother referred to the tube preamp as "a piece of junk" after hearing the differences between it and the SS piece.
The moral of this story is to use what you like and what gives you the performance / features that you seek. I'm sure that you can find something that will work excellently for you. I would not worry about the method ( tubes or SS ) to achieve those goals, but simply that the components get you to where you want to go. Sean
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