Coincident Dragon MK I vs MK II

Erndog,

I have a similar amp to your Dragons, the Cary 805AE. It uses a 300b to drive the 211. I have several pairs of 300b's and notice a difference just rolling them in while keeping the same 211.

I think it's worth experimenting. The "best" is subjective of course but I think most would be an improvement over the EH's. One of my favorites in the Cary is the Sophia Princess Mesh. I thought the Genalex Gold Lions were pretty good also.

fwiw, The Cary AE can take either a 845 or 211. I thought for sure the 845 would be my favorite. I had a 845 SET earlier in my path that I liked a lot. But it's the 211 that I enjoy the most in this amp. I still sub the 845 in for a change every once in awhile.

Like Charles, my favorite amp is a 300b SET. I use one in my hi-eff system. In my other system, that uses Magnepan 3.6's, I use Pass's XA100.5 amps. I decided to take a gamble and bought this Cary 805AE for the Maggies to see if I could pull off SE on them. It worked. Drop Dead Gorgeous sound and like you, find both the Pass and Cary to have their own strengths.

More updates....

Last night, I swapped out the Pangea power cords and tried some Audience powerchords and this was a very nice improvement. The soundstage got bigger and the Dragons sounded more open. This was not a subtle improvement.

I'm using the dragons with no preamp. I'm going direct from the Empirical Audio Overdrive dac into the mono blocks. My source is a 2011 Macbook Pro laptop, using Amarra version 4318 (this is the version Steve at Empirical recommends). For the USB cable, I'm using an inexpensive Belkin Gold.

So far my biggest grumble with the Dragons is that they don't have XLR inputs. My dac sounds significantly better using the XLR outs versus the RCA outs. As an experiment, I'm getting my Placette XLR cables modded to have RCA connectors on one end. We'll see what that does.

Also a friend of mine just read this thread and offered me to try out his Sophia Princess 300B's tubes! (Thanks Scott) I'll let you all know how these Sophia's sound in the Dragon.

Erndog,
This is good to hear. That amplifier is transparent and very uncolored, so power cord,cables and tube changes will be quite apparent.The Dragon as expected responds significantly to this type of fine tuning.You` re on the right track, just continue to trust your ears.
Regards,

Hello Erndog,
You have found a very nice recipe that works for you and to stick with, just season to your taste.
I love the 300b as does Charles. (currently using Sophia RP.)
My Pre has XLR out and I declined to use an adapter so I commissioned Tempo Electric, Joseph Levy, for XLR/RCA IC cable. You are about there... I would like to be there to listen...

I'm really enjoying getting this amp dialed in. So far everything I've done has produced a good result.

For whatever reason, I don't hear much about the 6EM7 input tube for the Dragon. Are people rolling this one too? I'm not sure how much of an impact this tube makes. Mine came with some NOS Sylvanias.