What is the best tube pre-amp for my system

I agree with George. You would be spending a ton of money to purchase a preamp that would do justice to your existing equipment, and if it provided any benefit at all it would probably be the result of either providing a more transparent volume control mechanism (which I doubt, given the apparent quality of the CD-5), or masking an existing deficiency in the system (which would be best addressed, if present, by determining the root cause and correcting it). And at the same time it may reduce overall transparency unacceptably, and it would probably result in too much gain, as George indicated. The latter issue forcing you to either use the preamp's volume control undesirably close to the bottom of its range, or to use it in conjunction with a lowered volume setting on the CD-5, which would negate what may be the main potential benefit of adding a preamp.

Regarding the impedance question raised by Reynolds853, both the 30 ohm output impedance of the Spheris and the 300 ohm output impedance of the CD-5 are fine matches for the X350.8.

Regards,
-- Al

If you don't plan to use any other source, while I rarely agree with George (and his comments about tube coloration are really off the mark), in this case it does not seem to make a lot of sense to employ a preamp.

Now if you have to have long interconnects between the amp and the volume control, a preamp might be in order, or if you plan to have more sources. But your CDP has a volume control, you might just try hooking it up directly. As best I can make out, that is part of its design.

Snooker14
This Ayon CD5 source you have has a 300ohm 6H30 tube output buffer, and it's stronger and has better drive than most tube preamps have, but still not as strong as most solid state output buffers (which I prefer), so keep your interconnects below 4 or so meters long.

What you'll get then by driving direct is a sound that is true to what the source is attempting to give you, and not be influenced by any additional tube or solid state preamp colourations/masking as well, with all their added needless electronics in the signal path, plus also another set of interconnects as well.

Cheers George

I have owned many tube preamps. Clearly IMHO the Exemplar XP-2 is the best I have ever heard. It really is dual mono units with even twin power cords. It can be used in balanced or single ended form and uses 5670 and 6829 tubes and has an outboard power supply.

Is there anyway to see the last post on my threads rather than the original?