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.

Spaz,
1st, I love the moniker. That is how I feel about my usual approach to equipment "upgrades" and auditions.
I too have a Pass Labs amp, the X250.5. I recently sold a BAT Vk5i preamp, used it with a Cary SLP 05, and for a long time an ARC LS15. All of these are tube preamps and represent a great deal of variation on implementation of different tube types. All had +/- 's. All, from what I heard, happen to be in the cool neutral group. I never heard a CJ preamp, from what I read falls in the romantic, classic tube sound, I guess depending on vintage.
I can tell you that despite all of these preamps being pretty solid offerings, none really made me feel "at home" with the sound long term. I felt like the presentation was a bit pushed too far forward as if the system was trying to hard to get me to listen to the vocals and other aspects of the upper midrange. I think the Pass amp has very nice qualities (on its own) and has such an open midband that the use of tube preamps that seem to "enhance" the midband may actually do more long term harm than good. I am patiently awaiting a Pass Labs X2.5 solid state preamp, should be here early next week. Though this sits at the "entry" point for the Pass preamp lineup, at $4k retail and since it's based on the same supersymmetry gain stage as the X.5 amps (that I love), I am pretty sure it will be a complementary approach to source/volume control. I am not expecting big fat tube glow and all that, in fact i'm hoping it is not that. On some recordings that "spotlit" midband can actually be annoying. Who knows? Given that i've been listening to tubes the past 3 years it will be an interesting thing to see if an all solid state amplification chain will do it for me. I love the amp, and I have a hunch that if the x2.5 is as transparent as the amp I should be pretty happy with the result...