What Solid State PreAmp?

Hi there MIKEAUDIO. Don't know what part of the country you're living in, but you really should try to get access to the H-Cat PR7 preamp (retail list $4995). I have used and owned many of the top-ranked preamps over the years (tube and solid state), but I have never heard a preamp that can bring the music to life like the H-Cat. The sound is frightingly live sounding. I have been an audiophile/music lover over 50 years and I can honestly say that the H-Cat is the "best of the best". Try it and don't make up your mind after 20 minutes as one audiogoner did. After it is fully broken in, you will have a hard time going back to any other preamp. It has no colorations of the sound. If you want to hear the truth, you won't be dissapointed.

Dave, it is not the design itself. It it is a lot less expencive in the long shot to fine tune the sound with pair of tubes then being stock with what you don't have any control of and its only a matter of time when bug hits again. It would be nice if one could come up with the formula that would answer the question to which is the best preamp out there. However, there is no such a thing and it never will be as long as there is two or more audiophiles with opinions and different tastes. I sill stand behide my opinion that you have more freedom and flexibility with tubes then SS and that leads to longer satisfaction. It is only my opinion Dave nothing personal.

No offense taken Mrstark. Thank you for your concern.

At the risk of staying OT a little longer, I see where some people might really enjoy tweaking and twiddling. That's totally valid. Still, for every tweaker that gets great enjoyment out of tracking down the best tubes for his or her amp or preamp, there's at least one non-tweaker, like me, that just wants great sounding equipment right out of the box and doesn't want to do anything but listen to music for the next ten-years or so.

So, I'll stick by my guns, IMHO, tube rolling is not an advantage of tubes vs. SS, UNLESS you really have a need to do such things and it makes you feel good, then I say, "Have at it." ;-)

I'll admit, I tube rolled my Woo Audio WA6 headphone amp. So shoot me. I'm not proud of it. I did research for weeks over at head-fi.org and then searched for weeks for a reasonably priced tube and then I struck, only one. I'm pleased with my upgrade. Jack Woo makes no bones that he offers the amp with compromise tubes and other circuits in order to me his mid three-digit price point. He offers upgrades. The expense was small in proportion to the rest of my system and my headphone setup is a much lower priority than my speakers. Hence, I fell off the wagon just this once.

Dave

Hi there again Mikeaudio. The correct model number of the H-Cat preamp is P12RX7. I just noticed on one of your responses that you have a McIntosh MC 402 amp. That's the same amp that I use and I am driving the Duntech Sovereigns. By the way, the Duntech's are a John Dunlavy design and they use all Dynaudio drivers. John Dunlavy sold the name Duntech to an Australian company and then came back to America and started Dunlavy Audio. John passed away I believe in January 2007 (RIP). Duntech is still in business in Australia. Anyway the combination of the H-Cat preamp and the Mac 402 is a magnificient sounding combination. Any how, good luck and remember, enjoy the music.

The H-Cat suggestions are worth looking into, particularly if you are looking to "wake up" a system. It may not be the answer if the system sounds too hard or in-your-face. It is not that the H-Cat is itself hard or harsh, but, it may be too revealing in some systems.

From a practical perspective, if you keep your amps on all the time (I would with high power solid state because such amps need a lot of warmup time to come on song), you would have to also keep your linestage on all the time or at least have a stage which mutes output when it warms up to avoid turn-on sounds from the linestage feeding a power amp that is on. This could eliminate some tube linestages from consideration.