Tubes?

tuberollin
"Yeah, beside tinnitus you are doing irreparable damage to your ears if you listen for very long at 90 dB."

I think I'm past that. It may have been the 2nd Black Sabbath concert or the Who, could it have been Pink Floyd? Not sure. But I bet the tweeters in my Salons sound really good. I'm more of a mid range and low end guy myself.

As was mentioned several times earlier get a tube preamp with octal tubes like the 6sn7, also a tube rectifier. I put a tube preamp in front of my krell amp and it sounds great, it sounded horrible with the solid state preamps I had. I know you can spend big money and get a really good sounding solid state preamp, but in my price range a tube preamp was better than the solid state preamps in the same price range.

If what you want is a tube amp with some muscle, a solid low end, that are well within your price range, take a look at the Bob Latino M125 monoblock amps from VTA. Available in kit form at $2233/pair or fully assembled & tested at $2955/pair. Totally killer.

Dave, 

A simple try might be to relieve your McIntosh 601s from doing deep bass duty to the Revels, letting your new subs do the heavy lifting from say 80hZ down from your preamplifier.  I use a Focusrite Clarett 4Pre USB Audio Interface DAC to divide the signal at 80hZ, allowing my 35W per side Music Reference to easily drive my hungry pair of Salk monitors to stadium rock and full orchestral levels.  Pin

If anybody has the balls to do it, an 833-A SET with its grid driven by a tube headphone amp with a transformer output about 600 Ohms and the 1000 Volt B+ to the 833A's through Hammond 1642SE transformer will give you more than enough power. It is not too difficult to build and I will email schematics of how I perfected this. The Hammond transformers are good for 300 ma before the cores saturate and the 833A run at zero grid bias draws about 115 ma. I use this and it is more than enough for my speakers rated at about 85 db.
But if you want more, a GM-100 triode run at 4000 to 5000 volts can give you more if you don't mind the finned anode cap offering instant death to anyone who touches it. It was designed in Bulgaria (the same country which sells glow-in-the-dark cloth from which you can sew together a suit to wear when walking from outside sunlight into a dark movie theater to watch a movie about radiation disasters) by some knuckleheads who wanted to call the 833A a wimpy choice of vacuum tube.