Some questions for fans of tubed gear (*): The arrival of Freya+ gives us a high-quality tubed preamp at a compelling price.
Q1: Does this change the future landscape for headphone amps with tubes?
Q2: Is there a significant SQ difference when the tubes are in preamp vs in the headphone (power) amp?
Q3: I'm guessing (for Q2) that there's more synergy with tubes in a power amp, for better or worse. More upside/downside leverage for happy/unhappy sound changes, so to speak. If that's true, does having the tubes in the preamp reduce the risk of going down the tube-rolling rabbit hole, and finding madness, bankruptcy & divorce at the bottom of said hole?
Q4: In general, is a tube preamp paired with a tube headphone amp too much of a good thing?
My underlying thought in posing these questions is that, everything else being equal, having tubes in the preamp gives fabulous flexibility. With a flip of the switch on the preamp, you can have solid-state sound or tube sound. One preamp does this for every amp you own, each amp can get some degree of tubiness.
(I'm assuming that, given enough input and output connectors on the preamp, at their main listening station most people would have one preamp they'd use more or less permanently as the central control unit. But you might have 2 or 3 amps hooked up at any given time, from your museum collection of amplifiers that seemed like a good idea at the time.)
(* I have one cheap tubed amp, a Project Sunrise III. I hardly ever use it anymore, and even less often try to swap in other tubes for experimental purposes. I've found that to be more hassle than fun; a distraction from listening to the music. So I have very little real experience with tubes or gear with tubes. Hence the questions.)