Back in 2024 I attended Axpona and the most memorable room to me was DeVore Fidelity O’Bronze, powered by a 300B based tube amplifier, driven by a Mola Mola Makua solid state preamp. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now I find myself wondering if it worked so well with a Mola Mola solid state preamp, why can’t it work just as good with an OC Naim preamp, given a suitable speaker/amp pairing? Has anyone experimented with OC Naim preamps alongside tube amplifiers before?
P.S. I’m well aware that Naim preamps are designed to work best with Naim amplifiers, so I’d appreciate it if that point wasn’t raised. Many fellow Naim owners drive active speakers with their Naim preamps and are quite happy with the results.
Edit:
Experiences with solid state non-Naim power amplifiers paired with OC Naim preamps also welcomed.
Actually Naim power amps have traditionallybeen designed to work with Naim preamps. The Naim preamps aren’t so fussy. In fact I believe a Naim preamp into a tube power amp is a known good pairing for some users.
I’d rather try a tube preamp with a Naim SS amp, than the other away around
Keith Herron told me that was the way to go. His excellent phono-stage and line-stage were tube components, but the mono-block amps he had for them were SS. He learned his craft building tube guitar amps.
In the end, I am not much of a fan of tubes anyway. To fussy IMHO.
Indeed, leaving solid state for the amplification would be the safer route, but the thing is I’m not just trying to introduce tubes in the signal path, but instead looking to amplify with tubes. Reason behind is I’ll be moving to a larger space soon and I’m thinking of getting bigger loudspeakers, probably Devore’s as that’s the sound signature I love, and also pair excellently with tubes. I’m also thinking of the more modern kind of high powered push/pull tube amps, not SETs.
Unfortunately, Naim power amps with a non Naim preamp can be very hit and miss. They require a Naim preamp for frequency limiting and if not provided they can become unstable. It makes it a bit of a gamble. Some preamps work but many don’t well.
Because a preamp doesn’t have any such restriction on the matching power amp, the reverse is not true and a Naim preamp can happily drive a non Naim power amp and there have been reports of pretty good results with tube power amps.
So I think one needs to be careful about generally good rule of thumb versus what actually is likely to work better in the slightly more idiosyncratic Naim context.
@llatpoh76
I haven’t tried neither a Naim preamp to a tube amp, nor a valve preamp to a Naim power amp, so I can’t give you a meaningful advice on this.
But regarding your proposition below somewhere I had seen John DeVore speaking very highly about the pairing of his speakers with Sugden class A power amplifiers.
My 252 works or worked well with my MF nu-vista 300 power. Ok, so the valves ( NVs) were not driving the output, but just acting as input buffers. Such a decent match, that im struggling to find a suitable replacement…….
