Anybody use a tube preamp with their home theater system?


I like using a tube preamp in a home theater system because it favorably influences the sound. A solid-state preamp maybe not so much although maybe it can good depending upon the component.

Problem I have is many really good tube preamps don’t offer a fully functional remote which is really important if the preamp is located in another room or even in the same room. Also not such a good idea to get a to preamp with a lot of tubes. My limit is four tubes. BAT offers a wonderful preamp that does quite well inside a Home theater system but it’s eight tubes. Ideally it would be awesome if you could turn the damn tubes off when you’re watching TV when you don’t need the tubes.

Vinnie Rossi offers a tube preamp, brama, that allows you to graduate between solid state and tubes which is very unusual and crazy expensive and only two tubes. The schit Freya remarkably offers output functionality controlled via remote that turns the tubes on or off, all this for under $1000. How Do they do that? Why don’t nobody Else?

Curious anyone else likes the idea of a preamp layered on top of a Home theater processor and what they do.

emergingsoul

I know it isn't your question but just as an aside, I use a tube amp in my HT system.  

One possible way to do it is an amp with 2 inputs.  Hook your tube preamp to one input, and your HT system to another.  That is currently what I'm doing with very good results.

Jerry

I have done this for the last 6 years. Currently Anthem AVM 70 and McIntosh C2700. I don't really notice much of a difference with it in pass through mode, I got it solely for two channel listening. Anthem isn't on for that.