Solid state to tube

@winoguy17

I agree with you. I switched my SS pre amp to a tube one, and I love the result. In my system I get the lush, smooth tube sound, with the power and control of SS amps.

^^^

  Glad to hear!

Hi winoguy. Interested th know what tube pre you settled with and what is your amplification?

What did you swap out the tube pre from

What was the most noticeable difference ss pre to tube pre?

@ecpninja, Reading there is no tube in your totaldac, and your plan to keep using your ss amplifer, seems to me you are in an ideal situation for a really good tube preamplifier if you want this type of sound.  What @yyman23 describes above was my experience too when I paired my own tube preamps with my former SS amps. 

You could try this for a good while and decide later if you still want to add tube amp(s) to your system.  May not be necessary, you might like this setup a lot. 

I would start with a Rogue Cronus Magnum 3. It’s not the quietest of amps but it does all the things that tubes are known to do well. It may fall short of some other tube and SS amps in one area or another but it’s pretty darn good as a complete package. It is in an entirely different league from Rogue’s hybrid tube/classD amps, the latter of which just sound like mediocre SS. The CM is one of my all time favorite amps. It has a very forward midrange but not in the obnoxious glaring way, but in a sense that it makes you feel like a artist is there in the room with you for an intimate performance. You’d probably have to move up to low power 300B tubes to do any better in this regard. 

The CM is manual bias but the procedure is simple and doesn’t have to be performed often. Manual bias is also preferred by many designers as they claim it results in better sound quality and bias stability.