best preamps

I'm ashamed about my Schiit Freya...it's not expensive enough to be taken seriously, and although it sounds fabulous it engenders scorn and shunning by high end audio geeks who spend multiples of its cost on other things

This is typical of many "hi-end" audio geeks that value sound with how a piece of equipment looks, polished machined cases and lights or how expensive it is.
They are the audiophile "glitz brigade" and are only interested in presenting their shiny equipment up on a pedestals were it does the most damage to image and depth perception, which is in between the speakers.
But hey it's the perfect place to gaze and ogle at from the listening position. 
Don't worry Wolf you've got it where it counts, on the inside. And have many $k's still in the bank.

Cheers George 

I don't have THAT many $k's (for the purposes of this conversation anyway...don't wanna trigger an audit)...remember the aforementioned Santa Cruz? Cocobolo my sneakers away. And it has to be pointed out often that it's way more fun to find relatively inexpensive great sounding stuff than arbitrarily emptying your pockets in the direction of an Audio Salon "Professional." 

Jeff Rowland Consonance / We can close this discussion now :-) 

Except that the Jeff Rowland sounds horrible in MY ROOM.

Like I wrote earlier, get a bunch of them and try them in YOUR ROOM, which, as everyone knows, is the most important determiner of how anything "sounds."

Why is this so hard to get across??

It is a great preamp but was also sarcasm richopp, lighten up.