The Best Preamp is no Preamp?

That means the pre does change the original music signal into slightly different signal. The modified signal would be good to our ears. Do not praise the preamp that makes poor source better. Just blame the poor source. If you have good source (well-recorded CD for example), you can enjoy the music much better with no preamp. Why does tube-based gears make good sound? Just because the tubes tend to add some distortion to the original signal, and the added signal makes our ears pleasing. The added signal is usually even-order frequencies.

Shorter speaker cables make the over-all sound better? I have to laugh at the guy who says that. Inside the speakers, there are very long coils. Due to limited space condition, the coil's physical shape can not be better than that of speaker cables. Compromised long speaker voice coil and very short speaker cable? Usually, the speaker cable length does not matter very much unless the cables run longer than 50 feet.

A preamp may well not load a source as heavily so the source may sound better due to wider bandwidth and lower distortion.

The choke in a speaker is something very different from the speaker cables! Speaker cables have low inductance while a choke has high inductance. But if we are to take this argument on its face, the correct conclusion would be that since a choke as able to cause highs to roll off and its substantially similar to a speaker cable, the conclusion would be that you really don't want long speaker cables! 

In practice, long speaker cables often cause a loss of bass impact and intelligibility of vocals. This is easily measured and demonstrated. 

If anyone reading this thread has a Lumin streamer in their system and has not tried the LEEDH volume control in the software, you should do so now. Your expensive preamp will find it's way on to Audiogon pretty quickly.

I doubt it very much, My MP-1 Pre-amp is a permernent keeper!  :-)

@ozzy62

While I do like the Leedh volume control on my Lumin T2, I still prefer my Tube Preamp, which adds more body and soul to the presentation.

 There is no substitute for listening.  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  Depends on your equipment and the ease of controlling volume, plus whatever moderating effect (or exacerbating effect) you preamp adds.  They will add something.

I have a second system that sounds almost as good as my first and actuall use more (its in my den).  I have an old Pioneer (with transport) feeding a Bel Canto DAC, a Dynaco FM-3 tuner, and an Audionics preamp (handling my phono cartridge)  and each is blessed with individual volume controls.  So they each go into a Zektor solenoid operated switch which in turn feeds the power amp.  Through Thiel 2.2's the system sounds superb.  Meanwhile, my main system feeds through my Audio Research SP-6 which also sounds superb.  You've got to try it to make the decision.