Need help picking my first tube amp

I recently was thinking about a cheap tube amp.  Caveat emptor.  Design is a very loose term.  One was wired as such that the tubes lit up but thats it.  Not sure where the sound came from.  As near as I can tell, there are a few good sounding ones Yakim and Cayin for example.  But their prices are high as others.  1000 to 1500 range.  Then lots of choices.  I thought about trying one from Amazon.  Some highly rated ones were basically mix and match parts.warranty service.  What's that.

from the sound of your post it almost seems as though you want to get into tubes for the sake of getting into tubes. Which is not really a good place to start. Better off to try and think what you really need and then see if there is a tubed option that fulfills your requirements. Probably not what you want to hear, but the best advice I can give.

Always been tube curious, i hear so much about them that i have finally decided to try them in a cheap way.  I have always been into music, amps, speakers, just never tried tubes.

I don’t think I am going to be of much help. (No experience with JBL nor those Mc units.)

But how are you doing the active crossover (Active-XO) for the bi-amping?

The new MiniDSP Flex would allow one to do the active-XO as L/R in and L-hi/L-low (etc) as it has 4 outputs.

That would keep most of the low freq (bass) power from needing to be amped up in the tweeter/horn side.

http://www.thebestamp.com/Tube_Pre-Amps/Classic_100_Series/QA-001-Mk3.php

This manufacturer has a tube preamp with headphone amp for a little over $700. I have his next model up from this one, which has a tube rectifier, it sounds great with my solid state amp.