New To Tubes & Direct Wadia to Tube Amp

i run my 850 directly into a pair of cj's perm. 12 amps (wltraliner, generally using 6550's. but i have experimented with kt90s). as cj does not incorporate balanced in/outputs, evenrything is connected via rca. i'm really, really happy. your choice of amp should depend, in part, upon your speakers (that is to say, it's power output should adequatly drive your speakers). in terms of blbloom's commnets, i was origionally shopping for an 830, but found a great deal on an 850 and snapped it up. there is a big difference between the two. they're both really well made and extremely musical machines. but i'm not at all surprised to learn that they behave differently when used with and without a preamp. by the way, bias adjust is a good thing. in short (and wihtout a lot of techincal explination, which is generally lost on my pea brain), it allows you to bias each tube (or each side) individually to get maximum performance. and you needn't worry about buying matched sets (but i still do). good luck. randy

Thank you for your comments. Randalleron,what interconnects are you using.

i'm currently using kimber's kcag and i really like them. i experimented with some of transparent's offerings (i'm using their speaker cable) but was happier with the kcags (they were a bit tinny at first, but broke in quite nicely). by way of background, until recently i was living in asia where good deals were relatively easy to come by (thus, the 850 rather than the 830). anyway, i got a good deal on a 1m pair of rca kcags and snapped them up. since then, i have seen a number of postings here about other, less costly, silver-based cables. sorry to say that my memory (or, more specifically, what my undergrad days did to my memory) isn't being too helpful right now. but if you spend a few minutes searching cable threads, you should be able to find out some more info. separately, as i re-read your thread, i too have pretty efficent speakers (somewhere in the 90-92 db/4 ohms range) and they are more than happy with the 140wpc that my amps give them. before i upgraded, i ran them briefly from cj's mv55 (45 wpc). they sounded good, the the additional power really opened them up and helped them sing. i've been told that they would have reacted just as well to about 70-80 wpc (i was shopping cj's premier 11a, an 85 wpc vtl offering and ar's 100wpc offering) but i never tried. i'll be interested to learn what amp(s) win your heart. randy.

I purchased a Wadia 861 (when my transport died) with the intent to connect directly to a Classe CA400 (removing my Classe DAC..). With the 861, the transients and detail were really phenomenal but I lost some of the midrange and sweet vocals. I considered auditioning some tube amps, but instead, I had the opportunity to auditioned a Sonic Frontiers Line 3 with a single pair of NOS seimens 7308 tube upgrades and the midrange was better than I have ever heard before. So much so, that I didn't dare change a thing. Just wrote a check for the Line 3...and every evening when I listen to music, I still get goose bumps on the vocals! The exact sound I was looking for! Happy Listening...Kent