Most Quiet TUBE Preamp. Linestage. $ 12K or less

Far down the price range from where Joefama is looking, both Welborne Labs and Wright Sound Company desing amps and preamps to work with 100-108dB horn speakers. They are extremely quiet with those ultra-sensitive horns and dead quiet with anything less. They are also extremely revealing and neutral.

There are quite a few amp companies targeting the high efficiency horn market specifically, they would be the best bet if absolute quiet is your highest priority. Gordon Rankin's Wavelength Audio comes to mind in the $12.5k-$19k(Silver wired transformers) range new.

Should be easy to find. I just bought an Audio Mirror PP1 tube preamp/phono stage for less than 10% of your budget.
It is quiet as a mouse unless I stick my ear up to the Scanspeak tweeter of my ACI Jaguar monitors.
Sounds very good also.

For $12,000 you should do quite well.

I was at Chris's house when we compared the ARC, BAT and Aesthetix and I can confirm that they were all very quiet. I never heard any noise or hum at all so I would venture to say they were silent, but I didn't stick my head in a speaker or anything:-).

As far as sonics went, I have to admit that the differences were seemingly minor given the hour or two we spent with each. If pushed I would say the ARC was the warmest of the three and had slightly fuller sounding bass, the Bat was the leanest and sounded a little less like tubes than the other two and the Aesthetix took the middle road. All three were extremely enjoyable and I would be happy to own any of them. My comments above are only to exxagerate the differences enough to give some idea of what I thought I heard, but I wouldn't want someone to think that BAT is lean or ARC warm. That would be misleading for sure.

I think all of us that were there were surprised to find ourselves struggling to come up with obvious differences. Chris's system is awesome and I would expect it to be very revealing of upstream components, so for all of us to be discussing their similarity more than the slight differences we could pick out I think speaks well of each design.

I think in the end if I had to choose from the three it would come down to features, user-friendliness, system compatibility and looks maybe, as I felt all of them performed very well.

Matt

My comments above are only to exxagerate the differences enough to give some idea of what I thought I heard, but I wouldn't want someone to think that BAT is lean or ARC warm. That would be misleading for sure.

Well said.

Regards,

Thanks for the brief descriptions Matt. It sounds like it made for an interesting day, a shoot out between those three preamps, I wish I was there. :)