going from tube preamp to solid state


just toying around with this and it might not even happen.

have a tube preamp now and while i might sell this later on and get another preamp.......have there been members that have had a tube preamp, sold it and went to a solid state preamp and kept it ?          or did you prefer the tube preamp sound and went back to it ?

maybe got a tube preamp that uses different tubes than the previous one did ?     

the preamp i have now, i like the way it sounds, but just not a fan of the 6sn7 and never really have been.   i prefer the 6922, 12au7 / 12ax7 tubes better.   

innersound300

I have had Schiit Freya + preamp and then Esoteric then SPL Director. The director also has a DAC that I don't use but the preamp is the exact same as the SPL Elector.  Here is a great review on how good it is.

http://v2.stereotimes.com/post/sound-performance-lab-spl-elector-preamp--performer-s800-amplifier-and--m1000-monos-by-terry-london

Just my personal experience.  I thought I’d never go back to SS for my pre until my Luxman started acting up.  I’d always wanted an Audio Research pre and figured this was as good a time as I was likely to see.  I’ve been using the ARC for about 6 weeks now I guess and don’t feel like I’m missing anything at this point.  Power amps are still tubes, so there’s that.  

There’s a little bit of an elephant in the room I believe. You are much more likely to be able to adjust your soundstage and imaging with different speakers than any kind of preamp changes. Possibly you just love your PBN’s so now you gotta find what works with them . I think if you changed speakers you might find that is the path to you desired sound

SPL Elector preamp is a superb solid state preamp.  The biggest soundstage I ever got with a preamp is with my Black Ice F360 hybrid preamp.  You can dial in some impressive space.  I would though ditch the stop tube and put in a Linlai 6SN7 as it is much better.

I admittedly did t read all the comments but if you're looking for soundstage, a lot of that will come from speaker placement in your room. For instance, if you have an amazing center image but not a lot of soundstage width or depth I'm gonna guess that your speakers are 1, too close together, or 2, toed in quite a bit. I was having soundstage depth issues and really spent a lot of time moving my heavy speakers around and found a setup that worked extremely well where I get both soundstage width and depth as well as great imaging. My speakers are pushed to where they're about 18 inches from the side walls and 10 feet apart. I have ZERO toe in. I've had that setup with 3 different preamps at this point and my personal experience is that the 2 6sn7 based preamps sounded better than the 12au7 mu follower design one. 

I guess what I'm saying is play with speaker placement. The equipment you have should be more than capable of producing a nice soundstage.