@rauliruegas I went back to old gmails to try to remember what year it was that you visited me, & heard my Atma-Sphere MA1 mkII amps and MP-3(Ralph’s most affordable model) preamp/phonopreamp. The preamp was fitted with my personal choices of vintage tubes, which ones exactly escapes my memory at this point. Another variable worth noting is you may recall is that my house was located about 1000ft. from the largest radio tower in my state, and it wreaked havoc on my phono playback at times with a wide variety of phono stages of all design types.
My gmail goes back to 2008 and the oldest messages we exchanged referenced your visit earlier. So what you heard at my place was 7-8 year old designs back 11 or more years ago. In other words gear designed by @atmasphere about 20 years ago. IME, not a fair comparison to what he offers today. We also listened through my Merlin speakers which while arguably quite revealing in the mids & treble, lack the ability to reproduce very low bass at all. To use that listening session as a testament to the detriment of tube gear or @atmasphere ’s gear in particular just doesn’t hold water IMHO.
@rauliruegas, unless it’s to suggest additional specific ss phono stages for @jetson in his budget, I’d suggest resisting the temptation to reply with more statements about merit of SS vs. tube gear or at least respect @jetson’s kindly worded request for you to take that conversation to a thread about SS vs. tube phono stages or gear in general. In a free world you have the choice to build bridges or burn them. With all due respect, I suggest you do the former.
As an aside, I'm about to go to a Nagra SS battery-powered phono stage in my system. FWIW, my experience is that both design types can be great and it's more about the individual design than just "tube vs. ss". Cheers,
Spencer
