Best preamp for and EAR890 / ESL57 rig

i agree. it's an amazing amp...the reason i asked what other audiogoners thought is that i've heard great things about shindos too. by the way, the klyne I own does a pretty good job. there was a recent klyne on sale the other day but i wasn't quick enough to get it. GG

Giovanni,

If indeed the load is 9000 ohms as stated above, then like Teajay a Shindo is not suited for your current system. Most tube preamps will not work. If you remove the subs and crossover, which I highly recommend, then many tube preamps will work well including Shindo and EAR.

regards,
Jonathan

Jonathan, Why would you recommend removing crossover and subs? The main drawback of the Quads is that they can't go below 55Hz. The Gradient woofers were designed specifically for the Quads (well, I could not find the ones designed for the 57. So, I am using those designed for the ESL 63) and allow you to enjoy the best of the Quads (midrange) and a pretty tight bass from 120Hz to 22Hz. Giovanni

Giovanni, I see that your subwoofer's crossover goes between your preamp and the power amps. It has a low pass output below 110 Hz and a high pass output for the main speakers (from the Gradient page).
So, I was wrong about paralelled amps loading down the preamp down to 9K...and Y adapters.
Anyway, I suggest that you ask Gradient or the distributor what is the crossover's input impedance.
If it is lower than 20 K ohms, most tube preamps will not drive it properly. In that case you need to look for a tube preamp with very low output impedance, lower than 500 ohms.
Any decent tube preamp will work wonderfully with a 50K load, but very few match well with a 10K load, typical of solid state devices.
Preamps with "super tubes" do have low output impedance: BAT, ARC come to mind.
The EAR 868 may work, if it is transformer coupled design as the EAR 912. Ask EAR about output impedance.
You will have decent bass if the crossover input impedance divided by the preamp output impedance equals 10 or more.
I suggest a factor of 20 because most tube preamps are limited in the bass by the size of their output coupling caps. The manufacturer may quote (for example) 500 ohms output impedance at 1 Khz, but it is much higher in the bass range, because the output cap's reactance increases at low frequencies.
Good luck

Thanks casouza. The power amp i use for the woofers actually has a 20K input impedance. I will ask Gradient about input impedance. Thanks. Giovanni