Tube sound with no tubes

You may come close to "tube sound" with some of the brands mentioned but you will not achieve the dimensionality and soundstaging of a good tube preamp. For that, well, you need tubes, not transistors.

Good modern tube preamp designs will have years of ZERO maintenance. The small signal tubes make very little heat and have a life expectancy of between 4000 and 10,000 hours.

Also, when it is time to replace the tubes, they are plug and play. If you can change a light bulb, you can replace the tubes in most preamps.

Finally, using tubes in a preamp or line stage has all of the sonic advantages and none of the disadvantages of tubes in a power amp which have to deal with a speaker load.

Davemitchell is correct for the most part. There are some preamps that have a reputation for being hard on tubes, but most should be good for several thousand hours at least. I would not leave a tube pre on 24/7, but if you had it one 10 hrs/day, you should get 1-2 years on one set of tubes. There are many tube pres out there that use 2-4 small signal tubes so buying 1 or 2 tubes/year is no big deal (and there is no biasing involved).

I agree with the Tom Evans Vibe and Pulse preamp. Not warm like tubes (I am taking CJ warm) but it did offer a 3D soundstage that no other SS preamp I tried could reproduce. Music floated back to front out of a black background. I did not have the additional power supply but I did use the preamp with a Pass Labs X-250 power amp. At the time I auditioned one, they were still very expensive and it was out of my price range then. If you can pick one up used for cheap, buy it.

Happy Listening.