Quote Originally Posted by LittleTone View Post
Hi Paul,
Hope you're well also.
Thanks for all the input guys; definitely gonna knock this one on the head. If I'm gonna spend that sort of money it needs to be
right and this is definitely a mismatch that I don't intend to try putting right. It was a worthwhile exercise; but it's going back to the dealer.
Do all valve preamps exhibit the same 50Kohm ish requirement of a power amp or is it just the Quad. You'll see from my profile that I do have the matching Elite SS preamp but I'm curious about alternatives, and now I don't require any phono input; in fact just a single input from a DAC is all that is required - What are your recommendations ?
The Quad valve pre did add some heft and body to the sound, integrated the bottom end quite nicely, or was the sound of overloading ?????
People often recommend using a valve preamp with a SS power amp, but personally I've had good results working the other way round. The input sections of a valve power amp have better tolerance on the whole for overload than SS, which usually work best with tightly-matched parameters, while a good SS pre can leave the signal pretty much untouched (as you'd want) and can sound great into a valve power amp, while at the same time sorting out the whole impedance matching issue that makes passive preamps such a hit and miss affair (for me they are at least an 80% miss, that's my experience anyway).

If you really like that Quad preamp I'd think about using it with a Class D power amp like some of the Lyngdorfs that work really well with valve input but have lowish (I think 1.2v from memory) input sensitivity. Some of the EAR power amps also have lowish input sensiitivity which make them easy to match with preamps.

There will be people who tell you that you should get a DAC or CDP with a volume control but in my experience 1) this rarely sounds that great mainly due to poor impedance matching - for the most part I see the gain control on a CDP either as a remote control friendly thing or as a gain matching device into a proper preamp, and 2) you might want to add further devices later though if you go for a multi input DAC and they are digital, this won't be an issue. But having said that it may well be worth exploring the main thing you want to be careful of is gain matching, you don't want a DAC or CDP that has 15 DB of gain into the Quad power amp like that preamp or you are back at square one.