new to tubes, match for spectral amp

I can't imagine mating any Spectral unit to any tube unit, amp or preamp. Besides, if you like Spectral, you won't like tubes, and vice versa; if you like Spectral, then any tube unit will sound slow to you. If you favor tubes, then Spectral sounds harmonically lean and spatially sterile. I'm a tube guy, so I'd replace both if you want to go to tubes. If not, stay where you are. Also, you have a package system tuned to work together and the the MIT, in particular, sounds best with SS.

Given the widely divergent musical presentations between Spectral and any decent tube gear, with due respect, I think you need to ask yourself why you liked Spectral enough to buy it (apart from the package MIT/Spectral/Avalon reason, assumably) and why you would now like to move so far away from that perspective.

Dear all,

Joe nice to hear from you. Advice well taken

Kw6 I didn't there was a way to have some other inpout protection at all.

Asa
I am just exploring the possibilities of a hybrid sound or maybe just some "tubing" of the vaunted spectral sound.
Don't be so concrete. Sometimes Ilike some things, sometimes I like to hear the music form a different perspective. Best of all is this web site where you can concievable buy and sell used equipment just for "trysies"

jd

If you are looking for minimal change, you might try a tube dac to feed the preamp. One of my friends has the full blown spectral/mit system. I loaned him my ARC ph-3 phono preamp (which we connected to his dmc-20), & noticed that it did give his system a little bit of tube glow. Didn't have the full on tube magic of my ph3/ref1/vt100 tube system but gave a glimpse. Spectral gear is so accurate that you hear those three 6922 tubes in the ph-3 all through the system. In my listening I hear the most tube magic from swapping the amplifier, followed by amp/pre, followed by amp/pre/source. That's with fairly limited trials using pass aleph amp/pre, arc amp/pre, bat pre, conrad-johnson amp, and mccormack dna amp.

Due regards to Asa, but the character of spectral vs. tubes in context of the Eidolon is less absolute. The Eidolons are warm enough and harmonically full enough in the mids/upper bass to mitigate some of spectral's leaness. And ARC reference can be fast and neutral enough to sound like solid state with more bloom - enough to offend some tubeophiles (and, yes, better imaging).
Like Jdwek, I would like to hear how dmc30/ARC Ref300's and ARCpre/DMA150 II Studio's combine.

Good point flex.
Actually the reason I started thinking about this was while in a stereo store I happened to hear some audio research stuff with eidolons. The cables in use were actually the cables they usually use for the spectral setup.
That got me thinking about when I first listened to this stuff about 5 years ago and I heard an audio research preamp and an older spectral amp. I liked it but at that time in my novitate I only knew about the spectral amp and preamp combo (as Asa implies). Now I am a bit more curious.....and maybe more sacrilegous.