Direct connect with the Emotiva

Good to hear that you are having good results with the Emotiva XDA-1. It has a volume control I believe so it can pull double duty as a DAC and preamp. One less piece of equipment in the chain right.

Yep, NOW you're cookin' with grease, right?? Lotsa 'philes have discovered the joys of going preampless. I haven't had a linestage for years. Anytime you can get rid of an entire component in the signal chain, you're doing something right, I think. Been using (the miraculous) Endler Audio Stepped Shunt Attenuators for a long while now and have NEVER looked back. Shure it forces me into a CD-only set-up, but I just don't even care - I never could or wanted to afford a 2-front war anyway. The Endlers are one tenth the cost of the kind of quality preamp it would take to better them...! I just couldn't tell these things were ever in my system at all. How do I know? Because I direct compared the attenuators to nothing all, just straight in from the DAC (with soft musical passages) and there were just no differences to be heard for me...can't GET no better than that. The only problem is that for proper sound, they MUST (no exceptions) be installed DIRECTLY at the amp inputs (no cabling inbetween). And, so you have to get up and change the volume, big deal, it's worth it! These things are analog volume controls so you're never throwing away digital bits and losing sound. From here on out, I know I'll never build another system any other way. Cheers.