Manley 300B preamp

Musicophile,

Sorry for the delay in my response. I did not have to do any bias change to the tubes. They work great in the preamplifier-very under stressed.

Mtrspt5: thanks, good to know that you don't have to adjust anything because of EML. However, I have just got a pair of Psvane 300B grade A from Grant Fidelity (great service) that need burn in time And, from my experience with Black Treasure it will take some time. At the moment I'm at holiday; so I'm abstinence after some listening on my system :-(. And since you have a Manley power, like me, that uses EL34 I can tell you that I also ordered a pair of quads of 6ca7 Black Treasure. So as you probably can understand, I'm eager to check out my system.

At the moment I only use a pair of Golden Dragon 6SL7 in the preamp. So I could check out your Brimar; is this the best choice?

I have the 300b preamp and really like it, mostly use it for headphones these days. My main preamp is the Allnic L5000 DHT preamp, which is almost too wonderfully special to describe, but the Manley isn't chopped liver and is fantastic with headphones.

I use Svetlana 300b, entirely too sensuous sounding and not bad on price.

JJ 300b's are models of clarity and space with the Manley.

I have been using the Manley 300b with Stax Lambda headphone. I took a Stax transformer intended for speakers, the srd 5, and soldered the wires to a banana jack to plug into the Manley 300b headphone socket. The Manley has more than enough juice to give a magnificent headphone experience with the Stax.

Cool, a setup with Stax. You have two awesome preamplifiers. Have never heard Allnic, but read about them.

Good to know that Svetlana and JJ also are musical in Manley.

Which 6SL7 do you prefer?

I am using some lowly shiney metal plate NOS RCA's. They have a lot of clarity to counter the 300b tendency toward lushness.

I also have no complaint about the original Russian 6sl7, Manley chooses tubes that are pretty well adapted to their products most of the time.

I use 5Z3 rectifiers ST type with tube adapters.

I had some brown base tung sols 6sl7s, which are pretty expensive nowadays, but wound up using them in another item, didn't sound better than the more ordinary types.

The Svetlanas sound like they were made for the Manley 300b, though, really nice.