After the post about my experience with Space Tech Labs and my STR, I wanted to post something a bit more positive. Today I received a custom built preamp from Pine Tree Audio. Pine Tree was recommended to me on this forum on a thread about passive preamps and after reaching out to Jesse we decided that rather than passive he would build a tube amp with solid state rectification. After several emails about my system and music tastes, we settled on a preamp centered around a pair of 6SN7 tubes.

The result is what he calls the 67+. It has a separate power supply, was finished in "Pine Tree Green" and I had mine outfitted with the option to run balanced inputs and outputs so I could set my SE84UFOs as balanced monoblocs.

It arrived today and I have been listening to it for the past few hours and it sounds absolutely incredible. Depth, soundstage, and a very textured and lifelike bass. My previous preamp was a Space Tech Lab that also ran 6SN7 tubes but even with the STR it was no where near this.... I don't know, good.

Lastly, Jesse was so great to work with and really knows his stuff. I am already thinking of more projects to do. I will also add that I had him do a bunch of Isobraid power cables for all of my components. Hard to say how much of a difference they made as I added them along with the preamp and the monobloc, but the quality is top notch.

Very nice! My (non-Decware) preamp also uses 6SN7s, but I quickly moved on to alternatives because they were considerably less expensive. I started with 7N7s but moved to 6J5 and equivalents which are single triodes, each one half of a 6SN7.

You can get pretty much whatever sound profile you want, from rich and tubey to crystal clear and extended at the frequency extremes depending on the tube. But the consistent thing is this: if your preamp is truly balanced then it is 4 channels, with each half of a 6SN7 handling a channel. And you get better imaging and dynamics if each channel has an individual tube, vs half of a dual triode. Sorta like dual mono vs. stereo.

But I totally get spending money on music vs. tubes and the VT-231s are top shelf for sure. In fact they were the reason I got into the single triodes. I got 4 of the "tall boy" metal base Sylvania 6J5GTs for 5 bucks each which was a fraction of the what a pair VT-231s cost, and that was 5+ years ago. Since then the single triodes have been "discovered" to some extent, but I've got pretty much a life time supply now.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to your impressions once you're on team "balanced mono."