new to tubes, match for spectral amp

Dear J.,

You are probably already aware that the input impedance of the Spectral amps is VERY low. This means that if you were to go to a tube preamp, you would have to be careful to choose one that has a low output impedance; absolutely below 100 ohms -- not an easy thing to find in tube preamps -- you might check into ARC. Also, you'd need to keep the interconnect from pre to amps below 2 meters in length.

BTW -- you may want to check with Spectral to see if your warranty on the amps would still be valid if you went in that direction.

Best of luck,
Joe

Not recommended at all! If you are inkling for the tube sound it is better to get a tube amp to mate with your DMC-30. Or get the DMA-150 II Studio version with the proper input protection and then you can use your tube pre-amp of choice and with any interconnects you want.

I can't imagine mating any Spectral unit to any tube unit, amp or preamp. Besides, if you like Spectral, you won't like tubes, and vice versa; if you like Spectral, then any tube unit will sound slow to you. If you favor tubes, then Spectral sounds harmonically lean and spatially sterile. I'm a tube guy, so I'd replace both if you want to go to tubes. If not, stay where you are. Also, you have a package system tuned to work together and the the MIT, in particular, sounds best with SS.

Given the widely divergent musical presentations between Spectral and any decent tube gear, with due respect, I think you need to ask yourself why you liked Spectral enough to buy it (apart from the package MIT/Spectral/Avalon reason, assumably) and why you would now like to move so far away from that perspective.

Dear all,

Joe nice to hear from you. Advice well taken

Kw6 I didn't there was a way to have some other inpout protection at all.

Asa
I am just exploring the possibilities of a hybrid sound or maybe just some "tubing" of the vaunted spectral sound.
Don't be so concrete. Sometimes Ilike some things, sometimes I like to hear the music form a different perspective. Best of all is this web site where you can concievable buy and sell used equipment just for "trysies"

jd