Quote Originally Posted by Poultrygeist View Post
I can understand a tube hybrid amp which has the power of solid state but with a tube preamp stage.
It is very expensive to get truly low noise high gain tube preamps, especially where phono is concerned. The Audio Research REF40 uses eight tubes for a line stage while Conrad-Johnson uses ten tubes in the ART line stage. Add another four for a phono stage.

By contrast, I have a hybrid Audio Research preamp that provides 67 db of gain with only two stages and is dead quiet. It uses an FET front end with a single tube follower for each of the phono and line stages. Works great with MC cartridges without having to add a transformer or pre-preamp stage.

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