Pre-Preamp?

Elizabeth has a point. I was thinking of the lesser SP9. Tube rolling your SP11 and upgrading the caps would give a new lease of life to your ARC amp.

I agree with Elizabeth - the SP-11 is a terrific preamp and may be worth keeping. I bought mine new - trading in an SP-10 - and used it for decades before replacing it a few years ago with a Ref 5SE. I sold the SP-11 to a friend who still uses it in his system and it sounds great. My main reason for upgrading wasn't disappointment in the sound, but the desire to have remote control. I am not familiar with the Prima Luna, but it doesn't seem like an upgrade to me.

My SP-11 is 33 years old so how much is that in pre-amp years? LOL.

@daveaj255 The thing is, when electronics get that old, its prudent to have the power supply filter capacitors replaced to maintain reliability. They tend to fail slowly and its common for them to take the power transformer with them at some point, which would be a really expensive repair if you can even get the part! So it you plan to keep the preamp get the power supply serviced. Also make sure you instruct the technician doing the work to be careful to get values as close to original as possible- the regulators in the SP-10 and SP-11 were unstable to say the least- its not a good idea to do something that might set them off.

Keep that SP11! Don't replace it with a Ch*nese - made preamp! Have a competent tech replace some power supply caps, if need be! It already has an excellent phono stage!

And if you need more gain for your mc cartridge, then get a good mc step up transformer - which I do and recommend!