$5000.00 To Spend Looking for Tube Pre-Amp

Dragon_vibe, I take it you want the preamp to support balanced operation?

If looking into speakers, check out http://www.audiokinesis.com These are some very refined and very easy to drive speakers that are also reasonably priced.

FWIW if you can get rid of the caps at the output of any preamp it will sound better. 'Better'= more bass extension, more transparent, less coloration.

So far the only preamp mentioned that has no coupling cap (or transformer) at its output is one of the preamps in the original post.