Modern Linestages

A preamp is often times the one component that brings a total system together and just makes it sing. Active or passive, a preamp is just one part of a stereo system intended to create music.

True to the source means true to the first link in the stereo system chain - the digital front end for instance. All front ends are flawed and what George is missing is fidelity to the particular digital source does not make one particular preamp the gold standard.

A stereo must have all of its sub-parts working together to create what sounds most like the instrument and voices it strives to recreate. An active pre in my experience can deliver this end system result with as much fidelity to the voice and instrument as a passive mated with ideal companion components.

A CD player direct to an amp in not the gold standard of fidelity to the human voice or instrument. It is however possibly the gold standard of assuring the signal gets to the amp exactly as it left the CD player.

The two have nothing to do with each other. It's all about the total system result.

Grannyring,
Beautifully said.

Onhwy61, if you want my opinion, keeping in mind that our preamps have a patented direct-coupled balanced output...

We solved a major problem facing tube preamps with that patent. It means that we can build a tube preamp that is flat to 1 Hz and can drive 32 ohm headphones directly, without additional circuitry for the headphones (other than the connector). So its my opinion that when you get into preamps that have that sort of price tag, you a paying for eye candy- really nicely machined, nicely finished and often very thick metal work to house a circuit that otherwise might be found in a preamp that costs 1/2 or 1/3 as much.

However such a budget does allow for more ornate switching schemes for the volume control and inputs and perhaps a few other things...

Now in our case we are already using custom materials for our circuit boards (to reduce dielectric effects of the board material) which is also extra thick (for the same reason). We have custom-built resistors, V-Cap Teflon caps, custom-built wire, proprietary regulators, the whole thing is balanced differential from phono input to line stage output with only 3 stages of gain in that path. In fact we set up the standards for how you connect a phono cartridge (which is a naturally balanced source) to a balanced input. We figured out how to do differential equalization and deal with a host of other issues, simply because no-one had done anything like this before we did. And that patented output does allow such cable control that if you set things up right, you will not be able to hear the difference between a cheap cable and a very expensive one (and it can drive over 100 feet of cable with no problem)! Overall its a pretty tweaked out preamp that has been refined over a 22-year period. So I don't think I could do your question justice with a casual answer.

Grannyring you go on that a good active preamp can mystically make a system sound "better", yet you deny the fact here and in other posts that it will be coloured or adding distortions to change this sound for the "better" You cannot have it both ways Grannyring.
The prefect preamp has be always touted as being a "straight wire with gain" this says no colourations and no distortions and to be "true to the source". A properly implemented passive comes closest to this, and direct connection from source to poweramp is a "straight wire but with no gain" as it is not needed.
If you think your source "sucks" then change it for the better, don't try to band-aid fix it with a $30k preamp.
The best quote in audio history was made by Ivor Tifenburm of Linn Sondek fame, "the most important part of a system to get right first is the source".

Cheers George

Georgelofi, Why would you say, "A properly implemented passive comes closest to this," I don't know how you would ever prove this. The only proof that I can imagine would be for music going into passive and active units compared with that coming out and an assessment of differences.

I might also note that you imply generic differences but you add "properly implemented." How would we ever know this? I have had six passive units now over about a 30 year period. I only once had two at the same time and they sounded in many ways different. In fact I strongly believe that until my present BMC unit, those earlier unit shared only a sense of purity and a lack of dynamics or pace. Which was properly implemented? One was only a silver transformer with multiple taps.

Similarly, I have had many, many active units and have never hear two that sounded alike. Some manufacturers have gone to extremes in pursuit of "proper implimentation." Some sounded better than others, but generically none were as smooth as passive units and all were more dynamic.