Preamp no longer makes a difference after caps and wire

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!

You might be right, the dac is Mirus Pro speakers are JBL 4319 recapped with mundorf supreme. The DAC by price is twice the speakers.

But the preamp now is significant if you don't try to look for what it is doing, because after some time, the music isn't very engaging without it.