Here's why tubes can be a major PITA!
Tonight, I figured one of my tube mono blocks was down...so I swapped in my ss Rowland stereo amp ( in place of the tube mono blocks) for a night of music and lo and behold...the same darn issue persists!! No sound out of the right channel!
This is so very odd as my first thought, see my OP, was to do this test and the sound was fine before when the ss amp was in the chain. This would seemingly now mean one of two things..a) the preamp has a problem or b) the right speaker is blown.
I swapped over speakers...put the left speaker on the right side and vice versa ( easy to do with stand mounts, luckily) Nope--the right channel is still silent. Hmmm. Seems to be a preamp issue ( which could still mean a tube has gone away, as I use a CAT tube preamp...)
So, onwards we go...