@daveteauk, just to clarify, my valve anxiety is based on the availability of replacement tube sets 5-10 years down the road. I already have a full replacement set that came with my ARC. But in an ideal world, my preamp should be good for a long time. I probably listen about an average of an hour or two a day and maybe 3 hours on the weekends. The power tube should last about 2000 hours and the other tubes about 4,000 hours, I think.
@dave777tx, my Wilson dealer, Salon Audio in Miami, thought that the Sabrina X's would be a better fit in my small room than the Sasha DAW's, although I am not really down with spending $25K+ on some speakers . . . But of course, selling the Sabrina's makes it more like a $13K outlay.
It is definitely interesting how peoples' opinion diverges though. Many people think that the XP-32 is very "tube-like" which is what attracted me to it over the ARC REF 6 as the "long-term," i.e., until I croak, preamp. Others love the ARC REF 6 sound. The bottom line seems to be that there is no way to know how it sounds with your system and room acoustics without actually putting it in. I have noticed that despite the clear opinions of various people, When I make changes to my system, they are not "night and day" but subtle improvements -- audible for sure, but still subtle. For me, and maybe this makes sense, I like the idea of not worrying about tube replacement and availability in the long run. For example, in addition to long term availability, how do you even know that a tube or tubes need to be replaced in the ARC REF 6, without a tube tester or a catastrophic failure? The Pass XP-32 does not have those questions.
The other thing that is very important to me is soundstage. I like a three dimensional soundstage (who doesn't) and my current setup has more soundstage width and placement of instruments but not as much depth. That may be speakers or preamp or both, but my Holy Grail, like many here, is that depth of soundstage like "you are there." I originally listened in the 70's to a system with Mark Levinson amp and preamp and stacked Quad ESL speakers and it sounded like the band was playing right in front of me -- although I am open to the possibility that was the weed that I had smoked that contributed to that, LOL! Many people's take about the XP-32 as increasing "realism" and depth, which is another reason I have been focused on the XP-32.