Tube amps under $7500


Ready to experiment with combinations never before (or not recently) tried. Step one requires a tube amp. Now looking at Prima Luna EVO 400 which sells for 5K. Any other tube amps I should consider in this price/feature range? Must come in silver with balanced input. For pairing experimentally with various tube and SS preamps. Efficient 4 ohm Legacy speakers (and the room/setup) are the constants.

 

hickamore

For me, it is not just that extremely deep and impactful bass is a low priority, I don't like the results I often hear with attempts to achieve such bass.  Often the bottom end sounds "dry" and toneless when that kind of bass is achieved.  I think it is quite hard to do proper active crossovers and bi-amplification and even adding subwoofers properly is tricky.  The bass quality of your speaker system is mostly a property of the speaker, not the amplification.  While it is possible to get some improvement by proper choice of amplifier, and perhaps by expert bi-amplification, I think it would be hard to avoid compromises in other aspects of performance or ease of use of the system.  I know people who constantly fiddle with subwoofer settings, bi-amplification level setting, etc., and that sort of attention to the system is not for me.  Some people enjoy that kind of tweaking, so it is a personal choice.

@larryi 

That kind of bass isn't a priority for me either. That said, I have full-range speakers that go down to 17hz so I don't really even need a subwoofer, though I do have some, they just aren't turned on most of the time.

I also don't mess with active crossovers, I let the speakers sort that out for themselves. While I use the low and high pass filters on my MEN2200, my primary goal was simply to take some of the load off of my tube amps by not feeding them any more signal than they needed. So I set the low/high pass filters respectively one octave above and one octave below the speakers existing cross over points. I haven't really touched it/fiddled with it too much since setting it up because it consistently sounds great, at least to my ears.

With the correct speaker nothing beats an OTL. I own Atma-sphere MA-1s. The M-60s are also very good at a lower price with less power.

OP, early in this thread, @bluethinker recommended the Audio Hungary P200.  I’ve heard very good things about this company.  Am not sure their stuff tilts warm, but wanted to make sure it got your attention.  Build quality is superb; friend of mine is a dealer and loves their stuff.  And it meets all of your other criteria - price, balanced out, silver, 100w….

@hickamore 

one more thought:  in the manual for your speakers, there’s actually a pretty lengthy discussion of biamping, and combining tubes with SS.  In that context it references something called an “amp balancer” available from your Legacy dealer.  I couldn’t find anything else on the www about it, but you might want to reach out to your dealer.