Hello Braro. Your pre is in fact the Chenin,identifiable by it's tube topology in the phono stage. The original Syrah and the cortese phono stage employed the 6gk5 and the 417/5842 family of dual triodes. Mick elected to use the more common 6922/6dj8 and 6J6 dual triodes for the phono stage of the Chenin. Hey gang.... there are many nos substitutes or deratives for both the 6J6 and the 6922.The 6j6 can be substituted with many drop in deratives such as the British made m8081,the telefunken ecc91 as well as a host of many others. Regarding the 6dj8/6922 dual triode.It is a relatively common tube and for many years has been the tube of choice for the phono stage of almost every major commercial company. There are a lot of sonic flavours to the 6922 family of triodes although the best examples of the tube can be rather pricy for tube rolling experimentation. I am not sure of what brand of 6922 that Mick is supplying with the chenin but I would suspect the Chenin is delivered with a currently made tube from russia or china. If that is infact the case here, and if you think it sounds great now...WOWZA!.... I can assure all of you here that your in for a very major surprise here as any one of the 60's examples of that tube type from manufacturers like seimens, telefunken, amperex,mullard etc will just flat out "knock your socks off" as a substitute here, and give one a lot more options to voice and dial in the sonic flavour of the phono stage with ones cartridge of choice! Just a word of caution though.... The 6922 family of dual triodes can be prone to microphonics and can also be noisey right out of the box, never a good thing in any high gain phono stage let alone the supratek. Those here with a stock of nos 6922/6dj8/ecc88/ecc188's and cca's may want to roll them here and post your findings. For those that don't have nos stock of the 6dj8/6922 family... I have a relatively inexpensive tube recommendation that's a definative sleeper tube substitute here and with little risk or liabilty. I suppose we can call it a nos tube as it was actually manufactured strictly for the Russian Miltary before the Soviet empire's collapse. The 6n23eb can be found out there [with a little searching] and every example of this tube is extremely quiet, sounds nothing like the hard and glarey sovtek examples being manufactured today. The triode sections are tighter than any other example of this tube type including the legendary cca's from seimen and telefunken.
