Seeking Suggestions on Preamp Upgrade (CJ, Aesthetix, EAR)

Hi, tooblue:  Thank you for your response.  My list contained LAMM originally but I read through the on-line information and found there were some discussions relate to LAMM's QC issue, which prompted me to drop it from the list.  Likely you have encountered them.  What is your taken?

Stewart0722, thank you for the warning.  I did notice there were some complaints about noise pop up here and there.  Most of them I noticed were about 10 years ago when the Aesthetix came up.  I don't know if it is still the case today.  When did those incidendents you described happen?  I will be worried if it is recently.

Jperry:

Thank you for the comment.  I wonder if you can elaborate a bit on Aesthetix and Pass mismatch.  I would like to have some tube sound to my system.  Everything I have so far is solid state so far.  I have been trying different cables to warm it up, and have made progress.  I hope rely on tube preamp to substantially improve the warmness of the sound.

Hi, Phil:

Nice suggestion.  My original intention is to confine the discussion within very few items based on the paper study I did.  I have omitted some very obvious major brands based on my first-hand experience.  I prefer a warmer sound, with laid-back, live-like, classical music remaking.   I go to live concert performance pretty frequently.  To me, a lot of equipment sounds too bright and too articulate to mimic the string groups in an orchestra.  Of course, this is only to me individually, and may not be applicable to majority.

My current system is free of listening fatigue - I can do a continuous listening for hours with peoridic performance or harpsichord of Baroque music.  But to compare to a live performance, there is still a distance.  I am not talking about personal emotional involvement, just pure acoustic quality.

I cannot afford the heavenly price tag equipment.  Just acoustic sound of classical music of natural sound, so the bass requirement (I rarely listen to music played by organ) is not very demanding but mid-range and high frequency may be my major concern.

Thank you very much for posting to clarify the purpose.  

Unsound and jperry:

Thank you for the insight on the impendence matching between the source and load.  I read some on-line information on this topic.  It appears that the the 1 to 10 ratio is related to balance between the maximum power transfer and system power efficiency optimizationis.  Back to the actual impendence readings for each brand listed above, none of them can meet the requirement for the rule of thumb, c-j's output impendence is less than 500ohm, and barely 100ohm for ET5, interesting perspective.

thank you again.

First of all, thank you all for the recommendations and shared your first hand experience.  It is a great learning experience.  

Stringreen, forgot to mention explicitly that I would like to go with tube preamp.  

tlalpan14600:

Thank you for the recommendation of Aesthetix.  I wonder if I can ask two questions of your using experience regarding Aesthetix.  

1). What is the distance between you and the speakers of your system.
2)  inside the Calypso there are internal gain adjustment for both channel.  One is 0db, the other is -12db.  Which gain adjustment do you use when you use Genelex from Shuguang?

I noticed some complaints on the web about noise level of Aesthetix, and thought about the possible cause of it.  

I assume that the input impendence of Jadis is about 135K ohm?

Thank you very much again!