How much do I need to spend to get a preamp that sounds better than no preamp?

And yet there are guys out there who don’t care for the result. “It sucks the life out of the music”, is a commonly heard refrain (really - I’m being serious here!). Maybe they are reacting psychologically to the need to turn the volume control up compared to an active preamp.

I suppose if I had to floor the accelerator to drive 55 mph, maybe I’d think the life was being sucked out of my driving. Then again, maybe I like 55. Nice and safe, good gas mileage…

Is impedance matching an issue? Passive volume controls do have to make a trade-off between input impedance and output impedance. If the input impedance is high, making the input to the volume control easy for the source to drive, then the output impedance is also high, possibly creating difficulty with the input impedance of the power amplifier. And vice versa: If your amplifier prefers low source impedance, then your signal source might have to look at low impedance in the volume control.

This suggests the possibility of using a high quality buffer in conjunction with a volume control. A buffer is still an active circuit using tubes or transistors, but it has no voltage gain – it only interposes itself to make a low impedance into a high impedance, or vice versa.

As per usual, George omits the rest of Nelson's words **after** the quote he usually trots out. I've included more of that text above, seems to me not for the first time on this thread.

As you can see, it points out that passives can't do the best job on their own, and are helped out by the use of a buffer. I've pointed this out many times on these threads about passive vs. actives.

What Nelson does not address is that a buffer at the input of the control is useful too. However, a buffer with no gain is going to have some signal loss. Its also *very* tricky to build a circuit with only a little gain without being on the edge of linearity with many devices, tube or transistor. So if you have a no gain buffer at the input of the control and a no gain buffer at the output, you may wind up with not enough voltage to drive the amp to full output. This is why there continue to be active line stages made, despite digital sources having higher voltage outputs for over 35 years.
My best surmise is that George consistently leaves out Nelson's complete remarks because they don't fit his world view.

So, impedance matching, and gain, are both important ?

An active preamp is an active buffer due to its gain, which largely resolves the issues of passive buffers.  Lots of circuits in the world have an active buffer to better mate an input to an output stage. A stereo system is no different.  I have yet to find a passive buffer/divider that does the job as well as an active buffer, mostly because of the much-lower output impedance in the latter, which prevents stage modulation.  It's also very easy to witness the benefit on an oscilloscope.

SMC amps designed to work great with just volume control so no preamp is best. 
If you find used McCormack Micro Line Drive that offers passive and buffered active preamplification, you will forget about searching any other preamps.

@atmasphere "As per usual, George omits the rest of Nelson's words **after** the quote he usually trots out. I've included more of that text above, seems to me not for the first time on this thread."

Looks like @csmgolf  (Cris) found the perfect description to how @georgehifi plays the game, cherry picking.

And as clearly seen, his other dirty trick is ignore questions by raising the issue of the other side being a fuser, snake-oilist, etc.  Then, he can dismiss that person out of hand, on anything audio and everything else in life, forever.  However, trying that with Cris and myself, George only exposed his own ploy as neither of us fall into any of those descriptions