The Wyred is likely to be exceedingly clean, focused, and detailed... also musical and non-fatiguing, but it won't give you tube warmth or other euphonic colorations that you may be looking for. I don't know anything about the McIntosh amp but if it's a nice sounding amp being paired with the Wyred should work well. If it has any inherent harshness the Wyred won't mask it.
But I bet that pairing the Wyred with the Viva Aurora would give very good results, letting you hear the best the Aurora has to give without glamorizing or veiling the sound.
It may be worth a try.
I'm using the W4S STI-500 currently and it's the lowest noise most detailed piece I've ever had in my system. Plus it throws a huge tube-like multi-layered soundstage.
I run my CD player through a good tube linestage first, but run my solid-state phono stage direct into the Wyred because that's the way it all sounds best.
I wouldn't be afraid to try it. It may save you a lot of dough and sound better as well. Of course there's no guarantee on that... but look at it another way. What if you bought an expensive tube preamp for say $9000 and then found out later that the Wyred pre sounds better. Despite what the above posters said, it could easily turn out that way.
And you not only get HT bypass, but on the fly polarity switching too. I kind of like that feature because with a lot of recordings the correct polarity sounds best. I have the polarity invert feature in both of my systems now and wouldn't want to be without that capability.
