OK, so you have PBN speakers (someone mentioned that you owned them but I didn't see it in a search), they are 42 inches from the front wall and they are firing straight ahead and your room is 12x11x8. Fairly small room for PBN speakers, it seems. I looked at the PBN website and most of their speakers are large and horn loaded in the high frequencies. Their smallest speaker has two eight inch woofers and a ribbon high frequency driver and the ribbon seems to be mounted in a waveguide/small horn as well. Not sure if you know, but horn speakers are very directional and in your smaller sized room, a lot of the high frequency information may be going right past you, straight to the back wall. A lot of set up advice tells you to keep speakers away from the side walls. For most speakers that have dome tweeters, this is very good advice. In your case, not so much. Horns and dipole speakers (electrostatics, planars, etc.) can be placed much closer to side walls without adverse effects. I would try moving your speakers closer to the sidewalls (maybe a foot and a half to two feet away, experiment) and toe them in a bit, not pointing at your ears, but maybe at your shoulders and see if that helps. Toe-in too much and the soundstage will close down and get smaller, too little tow in and the sound can sometimes become more diffuse. I currently own a 6SN7 preamp, and it has a marvelous soundstage, but then I am running some Sylvania "Bad Boys" from the early 1950's, so that helps. They were a dramatic change from the Chinese tubes that it shipped with. I have also owned preamps with 6922's and a couple of preamps with 12AX7"s. They all had an excellent soundstage. I have also run several SS preamps, and they also threw a quite decent soundstage. In a room your size I would personally try some monitor speakers that are known for their imaging and a sub woofer or two, depending on how much bass you like. The only other thing I can think of to suggest, is to reverse the phase on one end of your speaker cable. Just swap positive to negative on each speaker and see if that works. If that works, rock on and let us know. If not, don't forget to change them back. Hope this helps.
going from tube preamp to solid state
just toying around with this and it might not even happen.
have a tube preamp now and while i might sell this later on and get another preamp.......have there been members that have had a tube preamp, sold it and went to a solid state preamp and kept it ? or did you prefer the tube preamp sound and went back to it ?
maybe got a tube preamp that uses different tubes than the previous one did ?
the preamp i have now, i like the way it sounds, but just not a fan of the 6sn7 and never really have been. i prefer the 6922, 12au7 / 12ax7 tubes better.