You can use the ones they come with just fine, I’d honestly suggest doing that off the bat anyways. You can figure out if you like the chain, and if you do, you can then get better tubes to improve the sound and also further tailor it to your preferences. You can get some noticeable improvements/differences from swapping around tubes, but I’d only really do that once the stock ones burn in, and you get a feel for the amp and what sound you really want out of it
It’s pretty much that, just carefully take out the old and carefully put in the new, fairly straightforward, just want to make sure you put it in correctly the way it’s designed, and you don’t use too much force or with too much of an angle, then you just have to make sure it’s seated correctly. Might seem a bit weird at first to do, but not hard/not a big deal with this tube type
Honestly the harder part of tubes is just trying to find the ones you want to try and swapping in and out to find what you like lol, that can sometimes become a hassle
If you look used, you can find bf2 (and 2/64) for around 500 ish used, and liquid plat around 400 ish or under used, so pretty close to your initial budget tbh
I guess it depends on how higher end lol? What sort of budget would you really be looking at? I feel like before doing that, I’d really suggest trying some of the aforementioned amps and dac combos here, see how that changes things, and I’d also suggest getting in the hek first before going for the next level of chains past something like the bf2 and plat just to make sure that’s the headphone you want to stick with and build around. Since the higher you go in chain, typically the more specialized it is and the more dependent on synergy it is, so you want to make sure it’s going to be tailored toward the headphone(s) you actually want lol.
Personally for a hek for getting a really next level experience without going nuts, I’d shoot more toward a 2.5-3k ish budget used for the combined dac and the amp. For what options to consider in the range, would depend on what direction you wanted to go. I think I mentioned amp wise in the other thread that I’d see if I could get a good deal on something like a headamp gsx mini (around 1.2k ish used), bryston bha-1 (around 1.1k used), violectric v550 (around 1.7k ish used, also v281 around 1.4k), and a bit of a curveball a quicksilver headphone amp (around 1k new or used). Personally think those are some examples of amps that offer an overall substantial jump up from something like a plat/g111/iha-6 and such in the range. For what dac to pair with them, that would also depend on what direction you want to go. I think all of those amps pair well with the hek in different ways, and would also be very good with the meze
I’ve never tried the g111 with the empy, but I bet it would be good, I do think the plat is solid with the empy from my experience so no concern there personally
