Breaking the traditional notion, that tube pre would match well with solid amp, a decent solid pre can do wonders with a SET or tube amp. The whole questions of this sort of set up has to do with balance. A SET amp will provide glorious results in the highs and mids and yet be a little loose on the bottom end, and if you add a tube pre, perhaps you will get a darker, more of the same SET sound that will either becoming extremely intoxicating, or become a little bit heavy handed with the looseness of the bottom end. Sometimes, too much of one thing can REALLY be TOO MUCH. Read an article about this from SOUNDSTAGE, where the reviewer was reviewing the BEL CANTO Pre 1, solid state, with a tube amp. It seems as if the main designer at BEL CANTO has had that concept in mind when he designed, the now retired SET 40 integrated amp, which in fact is a SET 40 Amp, with a PRE 1 preamp section. The speakers that you will be driving will not affect you. Make you that they are fairly efficient if you are interested on a 2A3 SET amp, which is punny or even a 300B SET amp, 3 times more watts, but still below 10 watts. I have heard that you need efficiency of the speakers to be 96db+ if you are interested in using 2A3...I myself have a 300B amp, which was used to drive a pair of Voigt pipes, full range Fostex drivers at 96 db efficiency. The amps drove the pipes to very loud levels.