[Wind Chaser]

A little perspective is always nice.  What preamp did your TVC replace?

[spaggom]

A solid state STEG, 25 years old, from Italy:

http://english.gttrading.it/

Now they only make car audio, but the company was founded by Bartolomeo Aloia, the most famous italian audio ingenier. See some of they designs:

http://www.audiodesignguide.com/ba/

The TVC sounds better than the Steg preamp, with good space image a clear midle frecuencies, but with bass very limited by my speakers. (I'm waiting for a promi NOS DAC and some cables; I hope my flacs will sound great, but I'm thinking about buying a pair of speakers from China: Proac response 2.5 replicas; my budget is (very) limited now).

Some sugestion about how to improve audio from PC? (software -KM player, foobar,...- , hard discs, cables, etc). What do you thing about those speakers -for the budget-?
 

[Gaara]

Modwright SWL 9.0 SE.  I originally had a Ref3 (dual input dual mono) TVC w/ Rev2 transformers, I felt the Modwright was the better sounding of the two, but not by a large margin.

The main reason for the switch was cost (made $1000 by replacing the Modwright) and convenience.  I didn't like that the Modwright needed to be on to use the HT bypass as my room got hot enough without a tube pre running, plus it took to long to warm up, and had way to much gain for my tastes.

I would be interested to listen to it again compared to my current Rev3 Ref3 TVC.  I felt the Rev3 was a nice step up from the Rev2, and feel it would be a toss up between the two.

[milpai]

I just ordered the Ref C-Core with Elma switches. This is going to be replace the pre-amp inside the NAD C352 integrated amp. I believe, I will be one of the first few who will be using an integrated amp's power amp section with the TVC. Elsewhere on the thread, I have read people using Rotel integrated. But they did not have the chance to bypass the integrated's pre-amp. No where on the internet I got threads for people replacing internal pre-amp by a TVC. Maybe I missed something.
But I am keeping my fingers crossed.