TACT 2.2X As Preamp? Or Run Thru BAT?

This is going to be a try and hear answer I think. Your bat vk5i is a awesome preamp. I'd have to think that taking the tube pre out of the mix is going to give you a different sound. If you really have some serious room issues it might tonally sound better, but I wonder if the bat preamp will help with soundstage, air, depth etc.

Also, I'm not a fan of digital volume controls, ok at higher levels, but not lower. Just my experience here.

Could you use tubetraps or something to tame the room instead?

I think it is pretty common to use the TacT with an external preamp (I do, so it must be common, right?). It is also common to use it with an external DAC, and then you need to have the preamp to follow the DAC.

If you can swing it, I would try the TacT for awhile before you give the BAT the boot, both to see if you like it in the system and then to see if you like it as a preamp as well as a room correction system.

I debated a little while before posting this. First, you will clearly see that I am heavily biased here. I thought I would go ahead and post this, as this is a new product for our company, and most likely many A-goners do not know about it. All our company does is small room acoustics.

Most recently, we have designed the PARC (Parametric Adaptive Room Compensation). It is 2 channel, 3 bands per channel, fully adjustable notch filter system. We designed this sytem as state of the art, for dealing with bass room modes (it operates from 18 to 350 Hz). Balanced (Neutric) and single ended (WBT RCAs) full analog design for the signal path (with digital controls and memory settings). Thus there is no A/D or D/A conversion, which we felt was very important to analog lovers and to people that had very high end D/A converters and did not want to go through another conversion. It is designed to connect between your pre-amp and power amp (though other methods are possible). Separate sub-chasis for the control circuitry, 2 layer boards only. We have tested this with many systems, but most notable were Martin Logans and Genesis 201s. It's pretty remarkable how cleaning up the bass, even in a good room, brings out the clarity of the midrange. Please visit us at www.rivesaudio.com. You can go directly to the PARC at www.rivesaudio.com/PARC.

I don't know the answer, but with the addition of the optional TacT equalizer you might be able to restore some of the BAT qualities.

Thank you all for your very helpful replies. I forgot to say that I listen to a lot of LP's as well, so would need to use the A to D module. I will get a chance to have a live demo in my system, and will also have proper sound measurements done tomorrow to diagnose how bad the peaks/valleys are in the freq. response. Qualitatively, bass is definitely boomy with the speakers positioned for optimum soundstage width/depth/focus. The parametric equalizer route seems interesting as well.....