Pre/Power Amp pairing recommendation

Thanks for the replies and recommendations. Keep them coming. I'm leaning towards tubes and welcome recommendations as well.

Yes, Rlwainwright, that would be overkill, especially for the "Haydn Grands"!

An interesting fact, the Butler Monad A-100 monoblock amps have 1 Farad (that's 1 Million microFarads!!!) capacitance. Now THAT is overkill!

-RW-

I recently purchased a pair of Haydn Grands at a ridiculous price, too - with out the stands, though. I'm using a 60w/ch, Threshold T-100 class A power amp, with more than excellent results, especially in the bass department. Haydn Grands likes lots of good clean power to sound its best. 60w/ch doesn't seem like much, but it's all about the size of the power supply in the amp. The power supply in the T-100 has 128K micro farads of filter capacitance, which is over kill. So, high current, rather than a high wattage amp with low current for these little 4ohm speakers would be preferred, IMO. Although, you can have both as well, as in Lapierre's case. I also have a T-200, class A amp with 100w/ch, but the T-100 does just as great a job.

Musical Fidelity A308cr power amp delivering 72 amp peak-to-peak current @ 250 watt/ch.

Musical Fidelity A308 or A300 preamp.

Haydn bass will surprise you with the larger amps.

The Butler TDB-2250 for sale on A'gon would seem to be a worthy candidate - massively powerful tube goodness (250 watts/ch.) mated to MOSFET "balls". Research (and then buy) this amp ($1800) and then find a suitable pre and you will have a world-class system...

http://www.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/cls.pl?ampstran&1306268389&/Butler-TDB-2250-tube-hybrid

-RW-