[prepress]

It's been a while. The biggest discovery I've made with my setup was to put both pairs of speaker cable on the 4-ohm taps of my MC501s, as opposed to the lows being on the 2-ohm taps and the mids/highs on 4 ohm. The result has been a welcome change in fulness, weight and thump to the system's sound; even a bit more detail in some cases, usually in the lower frequencies. For the longest, I'd blamed the 2300 for thin lows as well as the tubes I was trying. Perhaps that was unfair to a degree. Granted, solid-state devices can have more slam than tubes, and that was my initial observation with switching to the 2300 from my ARC LS3, but bit by bit things have gotten better, to the point I'm pretty well satisfied.

I tried the stock tubes, Amperex, Mullard, Gold Lion, JJ High Performance, and Psvanes. The JJs held court for quite a while, and the low frequencies were the best of the bunch, but the Telefunken Black Diamond tubes (made by JJ) give me a bit more neutral sound than the JJs, which were warmer. And now that everything runs 4-ohm, it's almost like an equipment upgrade. That C52 (or C47, same audio circuit) might be tighter down low, I'm sure, but right now I'm rediscovering some of my music collection when time permits (not so much these days), and thinking the C2300 is finally living up to its hype and true promise because it now has the best opportunity ever to do so in my setup. I'm hearing what the C2300's been passing along all this time that my previous setup restricted.

I still won't say I'd never switch preamps, but it's much less likely now (finances notwithstanding).