Euphoric Realism vs. Euphonic Romanticism

Anybody heard the Audio Space Reference 2 full-function preamplifier?
It uses 300Bs and is a truly balanced design. Jonathan Valin did a review of it in the August 2007 issue of "The Absolute Sound."

Hear are some quotes:

"the Audio Space Reference 2 sounds in the midrange less like hi-fi and more like the real thing than virtually any other preamp I’ve auditioned."

"Usually when one thinks “300B,” one thinks of a warm, gorgeous, euphonically colored sound, rich in second harmonics. Here the sound is beautiful, of course, but utterly natural—non-colored, non-electronic."

Have not auditioned this preamp, but based on your love of the 300B, it may be worth your while to look into the Manley Labs 300B preamplifier, which incorporates the use of two 300B tubes in their design.

http://www.manleylabs.com/containerpages/300b99.html

Yes, that is certainly a possibility although when I heard it a few years back it came across as beautiful but euphonic (not that there is anything wrong with that).

I think the Audio Space will more closely match the 'modern' 300B sound that I was getting with the Mastersound integrated amplifier.
I should note that I made mistake earlier in this thread: the Mastersound 300B P.S.E. integrated amp has an active line section. I was incorrect when I said that the line section was passive.

I will pair the Audio Space with my Hovland Stratos amps this weekend and see how close I get to the magic of the little Mastersound integrated.

The Audio Space preamp and Hovland Stratos amps did not get close enough to the magic of the little Mastersound 300B integrated.
It looks like I will be selling the Hovlands and going with the Mastersound 845 monoblocks.

Exlibris, some things about this thread are striking. First, are you really running a 300B amp your MBLs? The impedance curve of the MBLs is a mismatch with zero feedback tube gear and will result in a brightness in the midrange. Here's what is going on:

http://www.atma-sphere.com/papers/paradigm_paper2.html

The MBLs are Voltage paradigm technology and the 300b amp is Power paradigm. Anytime you mix the two you can expect a tonal coloration at the very least, in this case it will be in the midrange and upper midrange- a vexing situation.

The result is likely that you will not like any preamp that is indeed neutral and musical, because it will not be laid back enough, due to the amp/speaker mismatch, if I got this right.

What you need is to run feedback so the amp can deal with the speaker. I was going to suggest that to you months ago. Either that or you need to think about a different speaker.
It would be easy to set up a feedback module that provides the gain needed to run the feedback, but IMO that defeats the purpose of zero feedback amplifiers (which is to more closely obey the rules of human hearing).