Trevor Wilson wrote:

snip

**Spoken, no doubt, by one who has yet to hear a CJ Prem 16. The Prem
16 is
as good as the best SS preamps I have ever heard. It is VERY quiet
and very
low distortion.



No, sure haven't. I'm pretty pleased with my homemade Marantz 7. It
has a toroidal power supply mounted outboard and ceramic sockets and
tag boards (no PCBs) pulled out of dead WE microwave telco equipment.
Counting the precision stepped attenuator I've got a whopping $150 in
this thing.

I have compared it to a couple of ARC units and IMO it sounded better,
but then I'm biased.


Incidentally it's worth noting that certain manufacturers of tube
power amplifiers specifically enjoin users from using solid state
preamps because small DC offsets could be propagated through their
amplifier for long enough to debias the finals.

**Only VERY poorly implemented SS preamps suffer such problems.
Additionally, the vast majority of tube power amps employ an input
coupling
cap, which makes your statement simply absurd.


Yes, but the manufacturer in question uses very large values of cap so
that a DC offset can swamp the output stage long enough to cause an
output tube to pull a lot of current long enough to shorten its life.
The fix is to replace the cap in question, of course, but you paid for
a manufactured product, not a kit...