Schiit Freya plus. Is this an upgrade?

They finally have pics of the internals on the schiit.com website. Lots of empty space in the Freya S compared to the +

Yeah - lots of empty space indeed! Those pics alone could score Freya+ the thunderdome victory - you know how superficial we audiophiles can be. 

@mulveling, lol

If you don't need the remote their headphone amps (solid state and tube) can be used as preamps. 

I used headphone amps as preamps for a while. They can sound good, but a dedicated pre can be better optimized for that application because it never needs to drive loads below 10,000 ohms, which has implications for the choice of parts and design of the output stage. E.g. for many tube preamps that means the ability to use much higher quality, lower capacitance film caps (for output coupling) within budget.