I know I'm in the minority on this, but I for one didn't like the C2300 that I owned for several months and found the Ref5 (as well as the LS27) to be far superior in my system. After a while I began to doubt myself and had a friend bring over a C2500 that he was demoing and we both agreed we still did not like the Mac preamps. At the time I even had MC601s, which are gone now too.
And yes, I tried different tubes...Gold Lions, NOS RCA Blackplates and even NOS Bugle Boys...to no avail.
In my experience ARC preamps have great synergy with Mac amps. I'm not so sure the opposite would be true...
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