Warm, rich but detailed SS preamp (made you give up tubes)

Not sure why the OP is worried about "fiddling" with tubes or them "blowing up." We all change light bulbs, right? A small signal tube lasts thousands of hours, sounds great, easy to change, and a decent one is not that expensive. Even PS Audio eventually relented and started putting tubes back in their SS gear. No way around it.

If one doesn’t want tubes, fine. Don’t get tubes. But no need to exaggerate their troublesomeness, especially if we’re talking small signal tubes in preamp. Right?

OP, thanks. I'm not disagreeing with you for any reason but to help you find what you want. That may be tubes, or it may not be, but hoping to help you act on the best information available and relevant to your needs. Cheers!

When a high degree of transparency is consistently maintained in one's system, it becomes obvious that there's not a consistently maintained high level of quality applied to the recording and mixing of music masters.

This is quite true. I would only add that it seems sensible to follow the path noble100 laid out, toward neutrality, and then if one finds oneself listening to a lot of recordings that reveal problems, it's a simple matter to add an inexpensive but well designed equalizer, such as Schiit's Loki.

@noble100 

Right-- use better quality recordings, when available, and keep things out of the signal path (with fewer interconnects). Absolutely. But there are things out there which are never remastered so, I guess it depends on what one is listening to.

@noble100 I hear you! The first time I listened to "Looking for a Home" my mouth just dropped open. I had never heard anything so present and real in my room before. Unbelievable. https://dsd-guide.com/fdn/keith-greeninger-dayan-kai-0

This was interesting, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttMNfFFi_Js