Best Preamp - NO preamp... (?)

Yep @georgehifi ... No one knows, but I doubt it, as Paul McGowan is one of the rare, brutally honest, no BS guys I've had the pleasure of knowing in this business. He was not ashamed to admit in the PS Audio forums, that a $10 Chinese made Amazon HDMI cable bettered his $400 PS Audio silver I2S cable. I bought that cable, and he was right... I'm still using it today.
And we need to remember that their setup is not the same as mine.
They tested the BHK preamp driving their solid state BHK power amps.
I use a flea-power Yamamoto A08S SET tube amplifier, which might happen to be a better match for the direct output of the DSD DAC than a solid state amp. 
It could also be that my speakers, a set of $6K Zu Audio Druids Mk V, don't reveal what the $50K Infinity IRS-V do (or the other way around?).
And yet... it might be the $$$, or just him giving ultimate respect for Mr. Bascom H. King. :-)

The $6K PS Audio BHK signature was the only one that came close to having no preamp at all, but still a clear second best.

Still in your own words, with the same source it came a clear second to going direct. With that $6k saving, you could throw that at the source, imagine what you’d have then ???

Cheers George

Need some help here. Have a Cary Cinema 11A that I run sound to my TV with and I am adding a Quad Artera Play + that has a great preamp and CD player. This is very important to me as sound is #1. The Artera will be arriving soon. If I run the Artera into the Cinema 11 A which acts as an AV, will that render the preamp and DAC in the Artera pointless? Will I still be getting the full effects of the DAC and preamp? Thanks

I was running a Benchmark DAC3 HGC directly into 2 AVM M30 Monoblocks. Very Cost efficient as the Benchmark has the Preamp onboard. By recommendation of Benchmark I was considering to ass their HPA4. I ended up adding the Hegel P-20 instead for aesthetic reasons. 

All I can say that it improved the SQ massively. Much bigger, much deeper, more refined. Basically the preamp section of the Benchmark 3 is replaced which the much more substantial Hegel preamp and the Benchmark DAC running in DAC mode improves performance aswell.

In my case the adding of an additional component has made a significant change in the overall system, in the desired direction.