A little late here, I find that unless the pre-amp is of exceptionally good quality the sound suffers vs using a DAC with a quality digital volume control.
I have done rooms for T.H.E. Show Newport and RMAF and we did some tests fully expecting an audible Illusions pre-amp to be better with the VAC than using direct to DAC. It was not the case. Using very high quality Chapman speakers with Scan Speak Drivers.
Now I did another test. Using a reasonably good DAC, the HEGEL HD25 feeding a set of Genelec s30D ribbon tweeter solid state class a/b tri-amplified 120 watts per channel speakers being fed power by DH Labs Redwave power cables (these made huge difference too) . I went direct into them and then through a very high quality E.A.R. 912 Pre-amp. The 912 was clearly superior sounding, bass was better deeper, fleshed out more delineated, piano harmonics were correct.
So in one test we had a VAC PHI 200 using a Wadia 860x Both the DAC and AMP were of very high quality the Audible Illusions 2a pre-amp was of medium quality.
In the other test we had speakers of not quite as good quality , a high value DAC of almost reference quality, and solid state amplification. In this test having tubes from the 912 pre-amp may have influenced the test.
My personal take after this... spend your money on better speakers and amps until you hit the pinnacle and then , and only then consider a top quality pre-amp.
