Let's forget about being politically correct

Asa, my mind is open. I would wholly agree that the Supratek is a killer preamp. A local friend of mine got one recently (one of my tube friends). I love the piece, and it works well in his system. One day he will bring it down to my system. And, I may even get one eventually. The Supratek is better than his other preamp which is a tube one and was made for him specially by a tube equipment designer (I cringe to think how much money he has in his old preamp).

I personally think that preamps are some of the hardest pieces for companies to do well. So many of them are not good at all... My opinion is that the preamp tends to be the component that puts the biggest sonic fingerprint on the end sound of the music. However, I also think that one badly matched AC cord in a system can totally screw up the sound as well...

I have had other tube preamps before, but I used the SF3SE and Ayre K-3x as comperable high dollar examples. I do know there are not too many preamps I would be happy with, and very few would make my short audition (should I have to come up with one: Hovland HP100, Ayre K-1x, Supratek preamps, and Niagra PL-L.

I even am very fond of tube amps. I have a friend who has the Tenors in an absolutely reference system, and the Tenors + the rest of his system totally blows me away. I once almost bought a pair of the Wolcotts, but when I brought them home their were technical problems (turned out something came unsodered). Anyway I returned them. They would have probably sounded pretty darn good heh heh. My only problem with tube amps is the cost of maintaining the tubes. The more power they can put out, usually the more tubes they have, and the more it costs to retube them. My 2 channel system is used for both HT and 2 channel so my two channel amp is left on 24/7 and gets a good workout. I would go through amp tubes fast.

KF

TOK: yes, tubes can be a hassle, especially on amps. I had an early Jadis that required 8 matched outputs, 4 matched drivers and 2 matched inputs that drove me up the wall. Actually, I don't think I could live witha big multi-tube amp again. That why I've settled on the SE route; many compromises in dynamics - you can get them, but you really have to balance it out correctly if using anything other than horns (and I've never been a horn guy...) - but let's me have the existential qualities I talked about above with minimum of tube hassles. So, I do know what you mean.

I agree wholeheartedly on what you said about pre's; I think that's why I yap about them so much, and why I've pushed the Supratek here. The pre is really the fulcrum of the system. In a beginning system, many times its best to construct a system from the speakers back (a relative statement guys; I know everything is important...), but I've found at some point it is very hard to get everything to click - at the point of delving into PC's as you mentioned - unless you build from the pre outwards. Yea, I know, speakers are the most personal choice, and you should never get speakers to make a pre happy, but I assume at that level the person knows what speakers work for him/her; the pre is the tough one, the integrator of the system, if you will, at that point.

I know what people mean by mushy tube sound. Many tube components are euphonic band-aids (many times for digital systems...), but that usually is encountered in beginning systems (where tuning is impossible to get around so you might as well deal with it as best you can, implanting a glimmer of what is possible and making the system, at the very least, non-fatiguing). With more advanced sytems, IMHO, you start to hear the pre weaknesses, both euphonic and in the ways I've described above, in that order. So, a euphonic pre may be a relative, valuable panacea in a beginning to mid-level system, but when the system moves to another level, the tube pre is left behind. That doesn't mean, as many people who make this transition assume, that any tube pre thereafter will be "colored". Believing so would be like saying an Ayre has the same degree of distortive artifacts as a beginner SS pre because lesser SS pre's generally retain that hallmark.

Anyway, things change as you go up the ladder, and valid assumptions at one point of system transition are not necessarily valid farther on. My position is that in the "magical" systems - and the "magic" of pyschic immersion in the event of musicality is what you end up shooting for towards the end - a tube pre, as a fulcrum of such system, is nearly indispensible towards attaining the spatial/dimensional/existential qualities in the stereo that catalyze the listening mind towards these deepest receptive levels of "art appreciation".

I want to be immersed in Van Gogh's "Wheat Fields and Cyprees Trees" - to be transported into the essence of beauty and exist within and as "it". And while I appreciate the realism of an Inge, or the brushwork of Sargeant, painting reality in terms of what the less deep mind sees as an accurate rendition of reality does not mean that because of that accuracy you will experience the art - the art you create when you put together a system - necessarily the same way at deeper symmetries of perception.

Reducing distortive artifacts is an admirable goal, but should, in the later transitions of your audio journey, not be a determitive one (this is not a lecture to you TOK, just me blathering again...).

TOK, I would be very interested in your reaction to the Supratek. I recommend it alot around here, and one of the reasons is because its detail and dynamics are so strong that people coming from SS - where those qualities are accentuated - don't recoil from its percieved absense as much. A "state-of-the-art" tube pre is not a piece that is appreciated right away, especially if you have a good SS pre already. With such SS pre's its hard to point to what they are not doing - its a subtle ommission of the existential qualities I talked about above - until you live with a (assumably) non-euphonic, hard-wired, dynamic NOS outfitted tube pre for a while, and then, and this is important, then take it out. Only then do you realize over the next month what is missing. It won't come to you right away because its not the thinking part of the mind that is missing it; the ommision needs time to arise into your non-listening thoughts, so to speak. This is because, as I've noted above, they are percieved, or their absense, when you are listening and not-thinking.

Oh, BTW, last thing: You have to have the right IC running from the pre to the amp in a tube system (and even with a tube pre/SS amp system, although to a lesser degree). Its critical, folks, so going from a SS system and using your Nordost isn't going to cut it. As we know, when a more musical component is inserted into a system, synergy usually requires that those pieces around it move up too. When accuracy is your goal, you can stay with the same Nordost-like IC's longer; but with a systems that aims towards the "magical" the IC becomes integral.

Asa: I was able to follow along with your last post 100% : ) I have to say that i agree with the points that you were making and found one point particularly interesting. That is, your comments about Nordost cabling.

The little bit of Nordost that i've tried did sound very "accurate" i.e. very detailed, fast, clean, etc..., but a large portion of the "magic" or "musicality" seemed to be knocked out of the system at the same time. Part of this might have been due to the lack of bass weight & warmth / shift in tonal balance that i experienced. The funny thing is that, according to most High End reviewers, the expensive Nordost stuff is the cream of the crop. My guess is that many of us have very different priorities & goals for our systems and this is just further evidence of that point.

Kind of funny how there are SO many variables that can be affected at one time by one component or cable change. Sean
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Sean, yes, I use Nordost as an analogy and example often because people know it and it was one of the first IC's to create an interesting dilemna. I was a reviewer at the time so had all the Nordost I wanted (Reynolds at Nordost is a very nice guy)so I could fool around with it a bit.

Nordost is like many of the most recent SS pre's: it reduces distortive artifacts to the point that you believe - your thinking listening mind beleives - that all is finally taken care of. But, somehow, something is not right, and you usually discover this over time. It creeps up on you. You can't point to any-thing that is accurately wrong because you are looking for things, accurate sound-sources. It takes a while because what is ommitted are the existential qualities I cited above: Nordost reduces mechanical artifacts in source while rendering a void space, producing, in the mind, a propensity to focus on the source as if it is an object. Its a source/space incongruency, yet one effected by ommission. Because ommision (the thinking mind is active and has a harder time noticing what is absent) and because what is absent is percieved predominantly in the non-thinking listening mind, what is wrong doesn't come to you right away. At first, in shallower listening levels, when you first sit down, you are impressed with the "clean-ness" of reduced distortive artifacts, vanishingly low in fact. But then, living with it, you notice a "tonal imbalance", which, perhaps, is due to harmonic lean-ness itself due to a lack of space WITHIN the source itself. Then, after a longer time, you realize that its just not "musical", which as I've asserted in an objective way means an ommission of rendering an existentially correct space.

If the IC can't translate the existential qualities "from" the tube pre, you can not blame the tube pre for the apparently percieved flaw.

Its always been frustrating for me to see someone move to a good tube pre but keep the less existentially correct IC and then only hear what is left in the tube pre's rendition, which is then precieved and argued as being euphonic. The spatially inadequate IC may be fine with a SS system, and appropriate in that context, but becomes a significant impediment when the transition from SS to tube is attempted. It leads to misperception, mistakenly atrributed to the newly inserted tube pre.

sean, even a dummy like me understood asa's last post.:]