Herron VTSP-3A

No, I heard it from my seat! Spoken to Keith and he did say it has to do with gains matching with power amps. Anything below 24db is good. I tried low gain and it's quiet but that mod does not sound as lively as in High gain. My friend told me to unearth all grounds and use dedicated power line. I will be going that path to be my next goal.

Does your amp have a gain switch or something?

Luna,

I have the 3A and it is dead quiet. Indeed, it is as quiet as the best of the solid state pre-amps, but is far more musical than any solid state pre. I bet you have a noisy tube that is causing the sound that you are hearing. You will not need to replace the tube. You merely will need to swith its position with one of the other tubes. Call Keith and ask him which two tubes you should switch. He will know. In the past I developed a similar noise in my VTSP-3 after a year of use, and I checked with Keith. He told me to switch the positions of two tubes and that resulted in absolute silence--like magic. I asked about my replacing the formerly noisy tube and he told me no to do so. It said it had years of use left in it, but that it merely needed to be in a different location so that its noisy characteristic would not affect the sound of the pre-amp. Keith is a part genius and part magician. I have not encountered any issues and certainly no noise with the 3A. I bet your issue with background noise or "fuzz" is the product of a noisy tube. The 3A is a superlative pre-amp. Let me know what happens.

Sflazor

I have the same sssss but I have had that on every piece of equipment I've owned. I chock it up to dirty power even with a power conditioner.

I apologize for all of the mispellings in my prior post. In the future I will proof read my posts before hitting the submit key. Oh well....

Sflazor