Most Quiet TUBE Preamp. Linestage. $ 12K or less


Hello gentlemen.
I am on the market now for an all TUBE preamp. Linestage only. My budget is $12K new or used. A main criteria is this tube preamp must be "Noiseless".

My main beef with tube preamps in the past is the Noise. I want dead silence. No HUM, No Buzz just dead silence.You can literally put your ear to the chasis and hear nothing.

Is there such an all Tube preamp that is Dead Silent ?

THANK YOU.
Joe
joefama

Showing 3 responses by mab33

Like Raquel said, at your budget there are some fine SS choices as well. I recently purchased an Essential 3150 from Raul and am very happy with it. There are a couple threads going on about it on the Analog form if you are interested.

Matt
I was at Chris's house when we compared the ARC, BAT and Aesthetix and I can confirm that they were all very quiet. I never heard any noise or hum at all so I would venture to say they were silent, but I didn't stick my head in a speaker or anything:-).

As far as sonics went, I have to admit that the differences were seemingly minor given the hour or two we spent with each. If pushed I would say the ARC was the warmest of the three and had slightly fuller sounding bass, the Bat was the leanest and sounded a little less like tubes than the other two and the Aesthetix took the middle road. All three were extremely enjoyable and I would be happy to own any of them. My comments above are only to exxagerate the differences enough to give some idea of what I thought I heard, but I wouldn't want someone to think that BAT is lean or ARC warm. That would be misleading for sure.

I think all of us that were there were surprised to find ourselves struggling to come up with obvious differences. Chris's system is awesome and I would expect it to be very revealing of upstream components, so for all of us to be discussing their similarity more than the slight differences we could pick out I think speaks well of each design.

I think in the end if I had to choose from the three it would come down to features, user-friendliness, system compatibility and looks maybe, as I felt all of them performed very well.

Matt
Sure...I wish I had more to offer in the descriptions, but it was my first time hearing Chris's system and with changing between 3 preamps and a fair amount of new music, it was a lot to get my head around. One thing is for sure, the music all sounded really great that day...which reminds me, I need to find the cello piece that Guido brought, cuz it was killer, but I can't remember who it was.