Tube Pre-amp Suggestions.

@mike4597 just missed out a RP-7 demo at Audio Advisor for $3,499

It was there yesterday, gone today...UGH!

Dodd audio preamp, Coincident Statement preamp

To the poster asking about the dehavilland. I have an ultraverve iii. Kara made it for around $3-4k a few years ago at my email request. Said she was still making a few until her parts ran out. Absolutely silent and velvety smooth into my Pass xa.25 and klipsch la scalas. No hiss through the horns. 

I have found that running my dac through a tube preamp sounds good, but I often need to listen briefly (30 minutes or less). The dac has preamp capability. Would it make sense to focus on a pre that can simply pass the dac signal through when I don’t have time to properly warm the tubes? Several of the preamps I looked at have pass thru, but they all use the tubes even for that. (My setup happens to be all  balanced.)

I have a sonnet Pasithea DAC with built in analog preamp that I prefer to run without either of the 2 preamps I had tried.

first was a Don Sachs model 2. While I really liked this preamp for it big spatial and full sound, I felt like I lost something in the micro details of the music.

second was a Halo Serene, which I.bought based on reviews saying that it was transparent and would not change the sound character. I didn’t find this accurate and I never did take to it.

BTW - The reason behind adding the preamp was for me to incorporate a turntable into the system. Otherwise I would have stayed without it.

However, With my prior DAC, the Rockna Wavelight, I will say that adding the Don sachs Pre was a substantially positive move. Much better with DS than without.

If I had to summarize this all, I’d say it very much depends on your particular gear and its all just a best guess until you try it and hear it for yourself.

Good luck