Best measuring tube pre amp?

[Purité Audio]

The issue isn’t vinyl/valves per se, everyone must listen to their preference , but the way in which they are marketed which implies the superiority of the totally analogue chain, the’ inner life ‘ of valves etc etc.
If the marketing stated this product adds audible second harmonic ( which you may lije) I wouldn’t have an issue.
Keith

 

[Sokel]

Its a good thing they did not show the multitone.... With a 1kHz sine wave it looks as though only harmonics are added which only change the 'tone'.
Reality is somewhat different.
Fortunately with music a lot of it is masked.

I can get a similar harmonic profile by overdriving my pre-amp (H2 and H3 get a 10-20db penalty depending how much) and I thought "hey,that's an option! ".
Until I measured IMD...

 

[SIY]

For distortion to be sound degrading with music you need quite a lot of it.

^This x1000. Most tube amps sound no different than a solid state amp when peeking isn't allowed (up to clipping, at which point conventional tube amps get a very ugly blocking distortion whereas most solid state amps recover quickly). Where there's differences, this can almost always be leveled out with a bit of EQ or an increase in output impedance.

"Tube sound" is bullshit.

 

[antcollinet]

Fair enough. In my first job I had a colleague called Joe King. Guess what, when we were introduced I said ‘you must be Joe King’. The poor chap didn’t laugh at all. Ask an innocent question about tubes, vinyl, cables on ASR and sooner or later someone is going to treat you like a buffoon. Maybe the first time it’s funny?

Didn't you see the last line of my reply? I basically said "ignore me - I'm the buffoon"

Mockery can't get more gentle than that. ASR would be a dull dull place if we couldn't have a little fun.

(I spin vinyl by the way: Have at it...)

 

[ta240]

I cannot imagine buying a tube thing without the nice distortion that comes with it (but with low noise).
What would be the point of that?Looks and glow only?

I mean even the best measuring stuff now offer such distortion factories (SINAD close to 40db and they call it "fine tunning" and "timbre" ) :

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I've actually considered getting the JDSLabs Element III to play with the 2nd harmonics settings with it. I've also thought about building a tube preamp just because I like building things and tubes are far more forgiving than transistors