Who is using passive preamps and why?


Seldom has there been any discussions on passive preamps in the forums and although my experience with them has been limited I have found them so far to be very enjoyable and refreshingly different. They seem to fall into their own category, somewhere between solid state and tube. Finding a preamp that is satisfing has been difficult. Some active solid state preamps can be very good but they seem to inject grain to some degree in the upper registers and some tube preamps are not too far behind. So far I think they should at least be matched up with an amp that has sufficient gain which is often overlooked. Which passives are you using and with what amp? Why do you like them?
phd
I would think a passive is very unlikely to ever need any support, no capacitors, no resistors, you should be grey before anything goes wrong.
IG316B, SOUNDS VERY GOOD. I still would be intersted in hearing which power amp you have paired the Ultra with.
Right now I have a McCormack DNA-1 Deluxe Gold with the Jensen's transformer inputs. At one point I had a pair of DNA-1 mono-blocks then switched to a pair of DNA-1 Deluxe Golds that I used to vertically bi-amp a pair of Vandersteen 3A Sig/2Wq combo. But the pair Gold's and a 2Wq and I were "lost" during my move here to Canada. My plan was to mono-block the Golds and do the Platinum upgrades. So right now I'm in the process of rebuilding. I heard this combo (VRE-1 and custom 0.5 mono's) at Steve's work shop a few years back and was blown away by what I heard. As a matter fact the pair of amps I heard Steve had for sale here on Agon. If I had had the cash back then I would have bought them. By the way the volume control in the Ultra is a Shallco stepped attenuator built to Steve's spec's and assembled with Audio Note resistors by Kris. Kris told me to be able to use this attenuator they had to bypass the passive output on the TLC and just use the buffered output. I wished I could have made a direct comparison between the before and after but the packers came a week after I got it back from SMc Audio. I hooked it up to make sure everything worked and could hear the difference just as soon as I fired it up. Took a while to get everything unpacked here in Canada, but this is a total different setup from what I had and I'm still rebuilding. I will tell you this is not the same TLC-1 that left my system. Wow sorry I got so long winded but I really enjoy the TLC now. By the way if you are ever in the area please drop me a line and we'll set up a session. You can enjoy some of the wine from some of the 32 wineries we have around here. Its not the Niagara region either.
Using Mod Squad Line Drive with Bryston 3B-ST and some fairly sensitive Mirage OM-10...cables by Tara Labs. Best sound I have ever had. My previous preamp, a Sonic Frontiers SFL-1 sounded good too though but I like the fact I don't have to turn anything off when I take a break. Tube preamps I would normally turn off when not in use.
Well you would think with minimal parts and no active circuitry (non-buffered designs) a passive would be low maintenance, but I've run into a few scenarios where owners of both Sonic Euphoria and Promitheus expressed issues related to noise/hum. I imagine you can occasionally get a bad transformer, or in the case of my Lightspeed a bad opto-coupler. So they are not maintenance free.

Also, I'm already gray so that probably increases my risk:)