Preamp no longer makes a difference after caps and wire

Sounds to me like some has designed and manufactured the "worlds best preamp", the mythological "straight wire with gain"!!!!! No colourations/distortions just the sound of, well, like going direct with source to amp.

Cheers George

It took a lot of tube rolling to get here, I've tried some really nice 'holy grail' tubes from telefunken, siemens, mullard, and russians. 

Turns out they all had coloration, the only ones that were neutral to my ears were matsushita/national - some very inexpensive tubes. 

They are biamped - audiosource 310v for woofers and mini mite monos for hf. 

The preamp was recommended in one of the last few articles written by Arnie Nudell. 

What amp are you using? 

The Pathos Aurium is a headphone amp, not a pre-amp. I read the user manual. According to the user manual, the "tape" outputs are a bypass. To me that implies that the tube and headphone amp are not in the circuit at all if you use the outputs.

I suspect you may not be using the Pathos properly. That would explain why you don't hear any difference when you turn off the Pathos. 

How are you "skipping" the tube in the pre-amp"? Are you turning off the Pathos?

All this tells me is that your DAC is much better than the rest of your system, and your speakers must not be very good. I've heard good balanced systems from moderate to very expensive and the preamp always makes a large difference!