Are Their any Tube Preamp with Home Theater Bypass?


Does anyone have experience with a decent tube based preamp with a home theater bypass feature?

kota1

Yes I have a McIntosh MX120 home theater preamp, with a McIntosh C2300 tube preamp. The C2300 has goes into bypass when the MX130 is on watching TV. Works excellent and love them both. Highly recommended. Although the C2300 has updated versions C2600 they all have bypass. 

I was in the same boat a while back. I didn't want to be limited to only amps with HT bypass. I decided to try a selector from Amazon,(SOLUPEAK P2 2(1)-in-1(2)-Out Amp) which does a great job and allows me to choose which amp feeds the speakers. It's a simple device and I have noticed no loss in quality. No issues with the tube amp and Marantz AVR after a few years. I actually swap between tube and some vintage SS in that system because it's made it very easy. It's a simple device and you could always upgrade the wire inside if you wanted to. 

IF you are using the system as your main 2 channel music and alternately as the front for a Home Theater via AVR:

then tube preamp is more desirable, thus tube life will be increased, but I would not avoid tubes IF tube sound is desired for the 2 channel use.

as noted, small tubes last 10,000 hours, and they do not cost too much. Always have a spare set ready.

the model that allows HT Bypass input to be used while the tube preamp is OFF sounds ideal.

My BAT VK30SE has theater bypass, but I don't use it anymore.  Instead, I run my home theater front pre outs into the SE inputs on my Bryston 4B SST2, and run the 2 channel preamp into the balanced inputs.  When I want to do theater, I just flip the input switches to SE and when I listen to 2 channel, I flip it back.  That way the systems are isolated but I still get the benefit of the Bryston and Maggies in the HT setup.