PrimaLuna Prologue 5 and tube upgrades

most of the new manufactured pre tubes are awful for good tube equipment... I've yet to find any I like after prolonged listening although the Prima Luna tubes are a safe bet for a tube thats musical but not detailed. And the NOS tubes definitely have sonic characteristics. Mullards, Siemens, Amperex, and Telefunkens from early 70's and before seem to work well, after that tube manufacturing went down hill with the exception of some Eastern Europe tubes in the early 80's. And it does cost, hard to find good NOS tubes for less than $50 per tube with 12AX7's the dearest.

BTW I heartily recommend the KT-120's instead of KT-88's...they remedy the main ill's that the reviewers have critiqued Prima Luna Prologue for, dynamic compression and missing low bass. They will however shine a spotlight on any distortion from your pre tubes, I found this especially noticeable on complex choral passages and ended up completely reshuffling my pre tube complement to eliminate.

I've been reading about non-feedback topology amplification and it being prone to be frequency limitations if not matched with the absolute perfect speaker system. Truth to this? If so, where are these perfect speakers that will give me the sparkle back?

Good thread, and extremely helpful to me as I purchased a PrimaLuna Prologue 5 just last week! Great advice with recommended tubes! Thank you. Once I start getting into some good tubes I'll report back!

Jmacinnis - I was doing some research on the Prologue 5 and found your post. Did you ever get this sorted out?

Do you still have the amp?