need suggestions, pre+amp for MBL 111F/101e

You will need a fairly robust amplifier that uses negative feedback. It can be tube or solid state. The speaker is not that hard to drive- 200 watts will do fine in most rooms. The use of feedback will cause the amplifier to be a little bright but you will need it, because the speaker is mostly 4 ohms except for a peak at 8 ohms in the upper midrange. If the amp does not cut its power back by 1/2 at that point it will sound harsh.

If I were you I would temper that by using a tube preamp with no feedback at all.

One nice combination I heard was using the MBL amplifiers with a balanced tube preamp. With a transistor preamp the same system was unlistenable.

Hi Mrkoen, do you actually own either of the MBL speakers you refer to in your topic, two different models.

There are lots of past threads you can refer to, you can even look at some on mine, I own MBL 101E's.

There are sugestions floating around out there that other models below the 101E sound similar but I disagree they are two different speakers and sound different.

Looking at either of these you need to take into consideration your room, size, design etc.

I love mine, I have owned and listened to many and these speakers do things that no others can periode, are they perfect? no but nothing is.

I am currently using McIntosh 1.2K's with my 111F's (and 111e's before that) and they handle them very nicely.

I think you will find the DAC's in the MCD-500 and newer MCD-1100 to be very competitive at their price points. You can connect two external servers to the 500 and three to the 1100. You retain SAD playback capabilities with both which is a plus