Tube preamp for techno and other bass-heavy music?

I listen to a lot of stuff with information below 42Hz! I played string bass in junior high and past college. So I find that bass response is important to me to be convincing, and since I like a lot of electronia, I have speakers that go to 20Hz and electronics to match.

In tinkering with a lot of tube preamps over the last 40 years, I found that the big problem in getting tube preamps to play bass is the output coupling cap. You can make it bigger to get bass, but if you do so you can loose detail as the bigger caps are less musical. So I started tinkering with direct-coupled outputs on the preamp, inspired by an old Berning preamp called the TF-10 (which also had a direct-coupled output). It was a bit of a trick but I got it to work.

Not only do you get deeper bass with a direct-coupled output, you also get more mid and high frequency detail without fatigue- its sort of the best of both worlds.

So- tube preamps thus have the ability to better than the best transistors, IOW deep bass is not an inherent limitation with tubes; it has to do with the coupling caps.

Well, that explains why the VAC Renaissance has superior bass compared to other preamps I've used. It has no coupling capacitors in the signal path. That said, I don't think Rrolack will find an Atmasphere or VAC Ren for under 2K.

IMHO, tube preamps are good for all types of music. I listen to various styles including jazz, blues, dixieland and heavy metal. A good tube preamp will reproduce the full spectrum of audio. The reason many solid state AMPLIFERS do better bass than tube AMPLIFIERS is because almost all tube amplifiers use output transformers and they can be the limiting factor for bass. Tube preamplifiers on the other hand do NOT usually have output transformers since they drive high impedance loads.