MFA Luminescence MC Reference preamp

Hello fellow audio-nuts. While you have most of the facts right, you've got some of them wrong. There was a preamp from MFA called "Luminescence" (I have two. One early pre-production A and a heavily moded B1), with various versions (A, B, C etc). There was a "Venusian", and an "MC Reference", both of which were NOT Luminescences. Lumi was the only one to my knowledge to use octal base tubes, and was dropped only for the reason of unavailability of inexpensive low-noise octal bases for the phono. MC Reference was actually a hybrid (technically speaking) design with heavy solid state regulation. Very rare and expensive in $5k range for a used one. Venusian I've never heard nor seen but I don't believe it used octal bases, I may be wrong here, but it was definitely not called a "Luminescence Venusian". Thanks for the forum, Mark

A question for kana813: do you have any pictures/schematics for Venusian? How was it broken down into three chassis? And BTW, I agree that you have to search hard to find a better phono (or line for that matter) than a Lumi. Recapping with modern colder and more open caps (MIT, InfiniCaps etc.) make a lot of difference too. I tried most everything including Loesch and still stuck with a Lumi. Phono section is a little noisy for MC cartridges but... Thanks, Mark