Pre-Outs

I'm looking at getting a tube pre-amp and will need to by-pass the built-in pre on the SP3. What connections do I use? The tape outs? If so, is there any other settings required on the SP3 to make this happen?

TAPE OUT or DVR OUT do bypass internal DSP and volume controller but the signals do go through internal unity (or near unity) buffers.

There is one peculiarity with the fixed gain outputs: they are automatically muted for their corresponding source selections, that is DVD-OUT is muted for DVR input selection and TAPE-OUT is muted for TAPE selection. That mimics a standard behavior of other receivers.

Another solution is to use 2CH Bypass selection on the source that uses an external preamp. That however does have the volume controller in the circuit, but it bypasses the DSP.