Tube Pre+ Transistor Power will burn your power Amp. easily?

just an Old Wives Tale

Only a problem if you buy them from a white van in the back of the mall parking lot.

Not true, so long as the Tube pre is working correctly.

However, there IS a failure mode which will cause this. Tube pre's have hundreds of volts of DC offset. This usually stays inside the pre-amp thanks to an output coupling cap.  I quoteth myself:

Most tube preamps are 2 very nice output coupling caps surrounded by tubes and a bunch of other stuff

If this coupling cap should fail (extremely unlikely with modern FILM caps) then yeah, you have insta-death of the amp.

Tube amps are going to be more immune to this problem but not entirely.  They usually have their own film input caps, and tolerant of high voltages anyway.

Best,

E

Faust 168,

     I agree with your other responses, I think this is not valid but I'm not certain.  I'd like to find out from an expert just to be certain.

    On the one hand, I combined a tube VTL pre-amp with a ss Aragon amp for years and it sounded very good.  I know it's very important to make sure the input impedance of the ss amp needs to be at least 10 times the output impedance of the tube pre-amp for a good match.  But I've never heard of these combos causing harm to the ss amp.

     On the other hand, some capacitors in my ss Aragon amp's power supply leaked after a few years and I had to replace it.  However, I attributed this to the amp being 15 yrs old and not to using a tube pre-amp.  I think I'm correct but am not certain.

     Better safe than sorry,
           Tim