Preamps: Tubes/music or SS/HT Best of both ????


While I make my living in the sound business I'm new to the world of highend home gear. I listen to classical with some 70's and 80's pop. I want because of space and money reasons to have HT and Music systems combined. I have chosen and bought Aerial 8 speakers now I am looking to upgrade my Carver electronics. I like transparant speakers with deep soundstage. I am told that only tube preamps will give me the music I want (power amp can be tube or SS). There doesn't seem to be a tube preamp that does the home theatre descrambling. How have others of you solved this dilema. I recently saw a Proceed AVP (one of the best and most expensive SS/HT pre's on sale for $3800 )by a guy who said he had decided to do a 2 channel only system. The fact that he was willing to take a $1200 loss after just 6 months would suggest that the AVP isn't so good with music. How have others of you solved this dilema (hopefully without repatching different head units for music or HT ???
sownman
I totally agree with the guy who abandoned his $3800 pre/pro and decided to go with a traditional two channel system because in my case I almost did the same. I was fortunate enough to keep my h/t system but decided to invest on a total new and separate musical two channel system and to me it was absolutely worth it. Music reproduced by the best pre/pro is still far less musical reproduced by hi-end pre-amps, I found out. If you have the bucks and the desire for sheer music like me, go with two channel pre-amp, tube pre-amp I should say.
If HT is your thing, then get the EAD Ovation TheaterMaster or the Sony 9000, both are SOTA. The Sony has a bypass mode which sends signals around all processing. However, HT coding is still in the "wars" stage (remember QS vs SQ quadraphonic - is 5.1 vs Dolby any different?). Agree with Tomp's reply about 2-channel for music, but why have a preamp at all? As far as tubes are concerned, they DO sound different, but this listener prefers not to have a distortion/equalizer unit in the sound chain. There are some excellent inexpensive preamps available if you need gain, believe it or not the cheap Rotel preamp has performance equal to a Krell, and the Morrison op-amp-based GAIN ONLY preamp will neither add nor subtract ANYTHING from your 2-channel listening experience.