High end stereo preamps? Worth it?

When I found that my German Physiks speakers sounded better with a Class D amp than my Krell, I removed the preamp and feed the MiniDSP streamer digital feed direct to the amp. This eliminates an unnecessary DAC and ADC cycle- and sounds wonderful. 

Consider ignoring the "If You can’t Measure it"..."Only Trust Blind Testing" posts and LISTEN....

That’s just it you can measure it, and hear it. Going direct is even better again than the quote below by Nelson Pass, as there’s one less set of interconnects and a volume pot in the signal path, when going direct.

Nelson Pass:

“We’ve got lots of gain in our electronics. More gain than some of us need or want. At least 10 db more.

Think of it this way: If you are running your volume control down around 9 o’clock, you are actually throwing away signal level so that a subsequent gain stage can make it back up.

Routinely DIYers opt to make themselves a “passive preamp” - just an input selector and a volume control.

What could be better? Hardly any noise or distortion added by these simple passive parts. No feedback, no worrying about what type of capacitors – just musical perfection.

And yet there are guys out there who don’t care for the result. “It sucks the life out of the music”, is a commonly heard refrain (really - I’m being serious here!). Maybe they are reacting psychologically to the need to turn the volume control up compared to an active preamp.”

Cheers George

Glad to hear Pass agrees with me. Now if I could only afford any of his equipment....

@georgehifi 
You forgot to post the rest of Pass' thoughts on the subject:

Is impedance matching an issue? Passive volume controls do have to make a trade-off between input impedance and output impedance. If the input impedance is high, making the input to the volume control easy for the source to drive, then the output impedance is also high, possibly creating difficulty with the input impedance of the power amplifier. And vice versa: If your amplifier prefers low source impedance, then your signal source might have to look at low impedance in the volume control.

This suggests the possibility of using a high quality buffer in conjunction with a volume control. A buffer is still an active circuit using tubes or transistors, but it has no voltage gain – it only interposes itself to make a low impedance into a high impedance, or vice versa.

If you put a buffer in front of a volume control, the control’s low impedance looks like high impedance. If you put a buffer after a volume control, it makes the output impedance much lower. You can put buffers before and after a volume control if you want.

The thing here is to try to make a buffer that is very neutral. Given the simple task, it’s pretty easy to construct simple buffers with very low distortion and noise and very wide bandwidth, all without negative feedback.

There are reasons many like what they hear through a preamp (or a unity gain buffer) better than through no preamp or through a passive.