Indeed - some well-informed comments throughout -- and.. little silliness! to boot.

In fact - several of the posts are among the clearest I've seem of the phenom of 'psych-acoustics' VS Hype. These would have merited a place in Audio Magazine in the olden days. Bookmarked for perusal later, a bit more.

(Your tip also exactly right-on: hmm, guess level 4 IS ~~ the level which screens out the useless crap sufficiently. Will remember that tip.)

Anyway - nice to see that the (actually rather difficult) topic is understood pretty decently, courtesy of at least one engineer AND musician.

A Soviet 6922 yet! That was a Premium expen$ive (hi-freq) tube, often used in the "distributed amplifiers" for state-of-art oscilloscopes (ie Tektronix). It featured *gold plated pins* too.. but dunno if it's That much better a choice for lo-level audio than a decent Telefunken or Mullard 12AX7A ... but I digress.

Gotta go back and see if I can find the actual mobo pic that prompted all this foofaraw - maybe later.



Ashton