Love the VK-5i !
It's one of the best preamps out there bar none. It is not as transparent as the 30SE and 50SE, but it is warmer and tubier sounding. If your system is a little bright or your tastes run to the more gentle tube side you may actually prefer it.
Put some relatively inexpensive 1960's NOS RCA 6922's tubes in it with some modern day Svetlana 6L6GC's and you are off to the races. The bogey for tubes is considered to be the Tung-sol 5881's and top shelf amperex 7308's. I tried some tung-sol's with NOS Russian 6922's. The Tung/Russian tubes were spankin new compared to the Svet/RCA with 1000 hours on them. I felt the sound was just as good though different so I packaged up the Tungsol/Russians and saved them for later. At 2 5881's and EIGHT 6922's the cost of NOS tubes can get up there.
One thing you should be careful of is this 'unity gain' feature that they have. It is a button on the remote that if pushed twice will turn the currently selected source up to FULL VOLUME. This of course could blow your speakers and ears out quite easily. It happened to me once but I was lucky enough to be playing something quiet at the time. Fortunately this feature is easily removed by calling up BAT and having them walk you through the opening of the remote and clipping the appropriate wires. They will also do it for you free of charge if you mail it in.
You do need to put a converter plug on the bat in order to use single ended sources. The BAT's do sound better than the cheaper $20 generic converters. This is actually not such a bad thing - you can buy the converters for seventy bucks or so and that's the end of it. Even though I don't have the 5i anymore I still kept all of my converter plugs because they are so darn useful.
The 5i does sound markedly better with a balanced source and output. I don't know if it's magic virtures are worth it if you run unbalanced.
It's one of the best preamps out there bar none. It is not as transparent as the 30SE and 50SE, but it is warmer and tubier sounding. If your system is a little bright or your tastes run to the more gentle tube side you may actually prefer it.
Put some relatively inexpensive 1960's NOS RCA 6922's tubes in it with some modern day Svetlana 6L6GC's and you are off to the races. The bogey for tubes is considered to be the Tung-sol 5881's and top shelf amperex 7308's. I tried some tung-sol's with NOS Russian 6922's. The Tung/Russian tubes were spankin new compared to the Svet/RCA with 1000 hours on them. I felt the sound was just as good though different so I packaged up the Tungsol/Russians and saved them for later. At 2 5881's and EIGHT 6922's the cost of NOS tubes can get up there.
One thing you should be careful of is this 'unity gain' feature that they have. It is a button on the remote that if pushed twice will turn the currently selected source up to FULL VOLUME. This of course could blow your speakers and ears out quite easily. It happened to me once but I was lucky enough to be playing something quiet at the time. Fortunately this feature is easily removed by calling up BAT and having them walk you through the opening of the remote and clipping the appropriate wires. They will also do it for you free of charge if you mail it in.
You do need to put a converter plug on the bat in order to use single ended sources. The BAT's do sound better than the cheaper $20 generic converters. This is actually not such a bad thing - you can buy the converters for seventy bucks or so and that's the end of it. Even though I don't have the 5i anymore I still kept all of my converter plugs because they are so darn useful.
The 5i does sound markedly better with a balanced source and output. I don't know if it's magic virtures are worth it if you run unbalanced.