Wyetech Labs Ruby Std preamp - any views?

Hi Pav. I'm surprised you felt the Hovland was prone to fatigue. It has shortcomings, but I wouldn't have accused it of that (neither did any reviews. YMMV, I guess), over the 7-8 years I've owned it.
I guess the Ruby would be an improvement if it's not guilty of this.

No problem, Peter.

BTW, before I bought the Opal, I had a Hovland HP100. It was my first tube product, and was gorgeous to look at and sounded great, albeit a bit light in the bass.

Neal

F1a, you state the Ruby is transparent, but on the warm side of neutral. I've actually found v.few components to be warm AND neutral, often these conflict, can you describe the sound a little further to illustrate how it pulls off what can be conflicting qualities?

Yeah somewhat contradictory... Transparent to me means detailed without the artificial edge you often hear in high NFB solid state. Warmth to me denotes naturalness, what we hear live. The Ruby's warmth also reveals the natural body of a tone, and preserves a beautiful harmonic portrayal. These qualities combined with its strong dynamics serve piano particularly well, with its percussive nature projecting effortlessly into the room. Quite engaging indeed to hear reproduced music come to life.

F1a,that sounds like the ideal balance of attributes. I'm actually pretty happy with my Hovland HP200 tube pre, but with a change in the balance of my system with 8kVA balanced power and grounding changes, there may be a bit of accusation of leaness to be made against the Hov.
So, no rush to audition the Ruby, and it's fairly difficult with me being in the UK and no dealer network, but it'll happen. And fortunately it's in the "sweet spot" of sub $10k that I'm happy to pay.