budget diy tube preamp beating many expensive preamps... problem with my system?

Smodtactical,

You have tens of thousands of dollars of gear, do yourself a favor and replace the cheap RCA cables. Really good cables can be had for not a lot of money, look at: Morrow Audio (MA4), DHLabs Air Matrix, Zavfino Arcadia or Fusion, LavriCables Reference or Ultimate Silver, Cullen Cables Copper or Crossover, or Supra Trico or Supra EFF-ISL (found on eBay).....don't think a single cable is more than $300, and will be huge upgrades and more worthy of your equipment.

Dude, you have a NS5000.....Yamaha designed a beautiful preamp called the C5000 (an engineering masterpiece) to go with that NS5000. You should get that preamp and do the type of tube toking that pleases you with some tube dac instead.

On the same note, get rid of the dumass amazon rca cables and get some Audioquest rca interconnects.