SET's and solid state

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.

Hello Kevin66. I bought my first tube amp in July
2002, a used 6 old month factory assembled
Welborne Labs 2A3 Moondogs with the Ultimate parts upgrade from here on Audiogon. Julian, the seller spent $6000 plus On Moondogs, Oris horns & Revellie crossover. Spending that kind of dinero got Ron Welborne to build him an amp after Ron had quit selling assembled products. Julian provided me with the invoice to verify their age & that the amps were factory assembled. After owning the Welborne Labs gear for 6 months Julian decided he wanted to go back to solid state gear. He sold it all here on Audiogon. I love picking up other guys castoff gear at a good price. Well back to preamps. I had intended to shop around & get a good used 6SN7 based tube preamp-I was really looking hard at the Wright WLA 12 preamp. I was running a Mcintosh solid state system previous to buying the Moondogs. MC 7150 autoformer amp, C 38 preamp, MR 77 tuner, MCD
7009 cd player, Pioneer Elite PD 65 cd player, 1977 Klipsch Cornwall speakers, 1983 Klipsch Cornwall speakers & a collection of 6 other pair
of speakers-2 pair of Advents, JBL etc. I initially used my Mcintosh C 38 preamp with the Moondogs & liked the resulting sonics with the Mcintosh/Moondog match. It was very pleasing to my ears. My search for a tube preamp was delayed for a while. Last month I bought a used mint
factory assembled Welborne Labs Revellie tube(6SN7) preamp from Fmpnd here on Audiogon & got an excellet deal. I like the Moondogs better with the Revellie tube preamp. Their is a better sonic synergy with the 2 Welborne Labs products. The Mac preamp was no slouch with the Moondogs, the Revellie just sounds better to my ears with the Moondogs. As always your mileage may vary running a solid state preamp with a SET amp.
Rambling from an opinionated Texan.

Regards, Mike

unless your sure your speakers are a great match (not good but great) you're not going to be happy with the s.e.t. using a passive mode preamp will only compound the problem...what are your speakers?

I believe that if the GFP 750 is used in its passive mode, there are no transistors in the signal path to color the sound. And if you need the additional gain of the active stage it really doesn't suffer very much in comparison to the purist passive mode. But I believe the unit is very vibration sensitive, so using some proper isolation feet and a good sturdy platform can have positive benefits -- especially in the active mode...

It could sound good. It depends on how sensitive you are to hearing transistors in the signal path. If that doesn't bother you, then it will be fine. Should be no problem with impedance matching. I can't comment on any specific synergy between those products.