Signal tube versus power tube, sound impact?

I guess "expensive" is relative. Brent's prices aren't out of line if you are willing to buy genuine vacuum tubes built to exacting standards from a time when the manufacturing of valves was at its apex....I believe a NOS Mullard or Bugle Boy 12ax7 is worth a significant premium over a JJ or Electroharmonix...

my manual for my amp and pre-amp - both from Decware - says to roll tube V1 - 12AX7 -  in the preamp and the 2 input tubes - 6922 - in the amp, before doing anything else. Amp is EL34. I currently have Winged C's and much prefer their bass and mid-range to current production from China that I have tried. Have not experimented with other EL34s or other types of tubes. My amp supports several other types, which I forget now. They are darn expensive.

I went back and forth experimenting with tubes in a little Japanese 300b integrated amp in this case the small 12v tubes definitely made a bigger sonic impact on the sound. There was a very big gain in the bass region

Seems to me the preamplifier tubes Carry the most weight when dealing with the sonic signature. It's at the beginning and why would you not want to amplify a quality signal right away. If you have a crappy preamplifier tube it's going to get amplified and sound crappy no matter how good the rest of the tubes are .

Anyone ever see a good diagram showing the circuitry flow within an amplifier or a good walk-through of the incoming power and incoming signal and how they ultimately do stuff before they go through the Cable leading to the speaker? And of course showing all the various tubes in series etc.  

Pleased to hear the opinion that power tubes matter more than signal tubes (only because that's what I have found to be true and I'm a confirmation whore.) Shirley you must know that this flies against common wisdom that pairs tube preamps with solid state power amps.