Last night I was listening to the system, and again ran into the need to turn down the volume some to listen comfortably. Materials were the new Santana CD and one of my reference DVDs. Overall, I have 27:19 on the Psvanes. I replaced the Psvanes with the JJs that were in there previously. I'll plan to reconnect the preamp today and listen for a few hours during the week as time permits.
I begin to understand both the fun and frustration of tube rolling, as I've found different results with the various tubes I've tried. The Mullards and Amperexes were both very clean-sounding to my ears, the lack of low-end punch being my complaint on them. The Amperexes seemed more midrange-forward, which I wasn't used to but had no complaint about. And they and the Mullards didn't have me turning the volume down; the Gold Lions and Psvanes did. And as chronicled earlier, with the Mullards in the 2300 I heard differences between my Kimber Hero and Transparent Plus interconnects, the Plus smoothing out the sound with CDs and DVDs.
We go forward and see what happens.
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SOTA, Grado, SME, Van den Hul, Gingko turntable setup; Pioneer Elite LD, BDP; Sony OLED TV; Magnum Dynalab tuner, antenna; MIT S-video cable; Pangea HDMI cables; DVDO video processor; McIntosh SACD, preamp, power amps; Telefunken Black Diamond preamp tubes; Kimber IC; Transparent IC, PC, SC; Mirage speakers; PS Audio, Shunyata PC; Audio Additives RCA caps; Furman power conditioning; Sanus: racks
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