Best Preamp = No Preamp?

Just to add a different perspective, if I am not mistaken the 600 ohm standard was originated by the telephone industry (good old Ma Bell) back in the day and adopted by the professional audio industry. Seems the phone company knew the benefit of this as it applied to long cable runs as well.

I'll say it again,
Most solid state sources these days have very low impedance output stage buffers that can drive anything, and are as good if not better than many preamps and without the colouration, especially tube preamp.
A preamp that can drive 32ohms, that does not make it a necessity to have in the signal path, keep it as a headphone amp. As most solid state sources will drive anything they see today.

Cheers George

A lot of the best recordings made in the "golden age" were so in large part to good engineers using better recording techniques with little concern about dumbing down the sound to the lowest commercial denominator.

The golden age was late fifties right after high fidelity stereo debuted and was a brand new big deal. Like most things it's mostly taken for granted these days. When is the last time anyone ever referred to high fidelity sound? Oh yeah now it's high end and uber expensive. Fact is most audio people listen to today is quite hifi at various price points whereas it took something really special to make it happen with the technology available to consumers in those ancient times.

^One could argue that many engineers go out of their way to make many of today's pop recordings intentionally ultimately bad.