I crank it up quite regularly and I never heard any hissing with my gain structure and speakers, but yeah it may vary with the rest of the chain. It's a very quiet preamp, that's what I like about it. I agree that for headphone amps it may be a different story but why bring that in the comparison?What a load of Schiit IMO. I firmly believe that the sole reason for the JJ being considered as a dirty tube due to how dirt cheap it is compared to Tung Sol and NOS tubes. My headphone tube amp is 100% JJ KT88 power tubes and JJ 6SL7 input tube (supposed to be noiser than 6SN7) and it's the cheapest brand out of all KT88 and 6SL7 tube types, and my headphone amp has (hate this term but had to write it anyways) inky black background with zero noise and zero hissing even when cranked to 100+ dB SPL levels (watching Blu-ray movies with Dolby Atmos encoding)
Edit. Sorry I now see you are commenting about the JJ tubes themselves, missed to conversation background, my bad.
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