Does a preamp have enough power to drive small speakers on its own? Could preamp output be mated to an impedance adjusting "black box" to bypass a main amp? I've seen many preamps (Cary comes to mind) that look like they could do it.
With a transformer, some preamps might be able to drive small speakers at low volume but there's a reason they are preamps, not amps: inadequate power!
Preamps by themselves don't have the current to drive low impedance loads nor the output voltage to drive high impedance loads. If another driver (gain) stage is added, it can be done - then it would be called an integrated amp :)
I have a McIntosh C34V pre which I bought new (and it still looks and sounds the same as day 1) which has a built in 20W/ch amp. While designed for headphones, Mac included speaker terminals on the rear of the pre. A nice, handy little touch.
Thanks for all responses! I know this query is kind of off-the-wall but thought it would be interesting. If you've ever seen the guts of a BAT 50SE preamp, you'll know why driving tiny speakers shouldn't be unreasonable.
I went to a Threshold demo many years ago and the rep had hooked up a Threshold FET 10e to small speakers to demonstrate the robustness of their separate power supply. This particular preamp had a very low output impedance and put out a few watts of class A power into the speaker load at 8 ohms instead of the typical amp loak of 50 k ohms.
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