Best Preamp = No Preamp?

When you put a pre amp into your system you are now listening to music that has been changed by the manufacturer of said pre. If you had the option of playing two or three pre amps one after the other your system would sound a little different with each pre. Going direct with the correct combination of equipment can deliver full, warm and very detailed music. Every pre amp out there has some type of sonic signature---some you may like, others you may not. No pre---no signature-------

Forgot to mention----sonic signature os interconnects and another power cord!!!!!!!!

isn't using the variable output that's built into a dac or cd player the same as using a preamp? only difference is that the preamp is built-in to these units. if that assumption is correct, any preamp better than the built-in volume control should be better.

no preamp would be more like taking the fixed line out, with the variable output defeated, and connecting straight to an amp, which is not too practical in the real world.

Grannyring, your right, and here is the deal, your post came out and got approved at the same time as mine to be viewed by others... actually about 5 other posts went at the same time and hours later posted that were not up when I wrote mine, so when somebody looks at the thread it looks like comments were directly posted about immediatly above posts.. We will see if A-Gon lets this explanation post, I have put it several times on other posts and they just block it and sometimes it can make people look "Wrong" or un-clear of who they are directing posts toward. Yes we totally agree on the preamp issue.

I have both a transporter and a squeezebox. Problem if you use the integrated volume control is that the preamp gain setting is implemented in by a digital gain setting in the DAC chip: if you output less than ~30dB below the max volume, you start losing on S?N ratio (that's why I use two passive attenuators at the input of the amp, as the amp gain is too high). Result is quite good...
On other DAC/CD players, the preamplification is done in analog domain, like in my (ordered) APL NWO 2.5T (supposed to be great, even better than the best preamp, will tell you when I receive it next month)