Passive preamp

@georgehifi 
I have sent you an email asking for pricing info for the Lightspeed Attenuator. A friend and I will test it seeing as though the reviews have been rave. Excellent work, George. Incredibly excellent work. However, when I am having a party (I have them quite often) and would like to change among sources, it would be great to have a passive tube preamp that can accomplish this. I have read about the Schiit Freya among others. Would you make any recommendations? Thanks so much for your time.

I own the original version of the Schiit Freya and it can switch immediately (the newer Freya + "improved" version shuts off the tubes when one of the other outputs, passive or FET, are utilized...so you have to wait for the tubes to warm up if switched) between the 3 modes...passive sounds fine but the tube mode sounds better for my tastes. Just more "there" there. Switching among modes keeps the tubes honest since if you notice a degradation of some sort with the tube mode you simply replace the tubes.

@georgehifi 
I have sent you an email asking for pricing info for the Lightspeed Attenuator. A friend and I will test it seeing as though the reviews have been rave. Excellent work, George. Incredibly excellent work. However, when I am having a party (I have them quite often) and would like to change among sources, it would be great to have a passive tube preamp that can accomplish this.

Sent with mandatory propaganda attachments.  And yes as Wolf points out the Freya is a great universal unit, I have recommended it many a time here on Audiogon.
As for a passive though the transparency/dynamics of the Lightspeed has no equal, as there are no contacts  in the signal path in the circuit.
 https://ibb.co/XbCsn2B

Cheers George

How come passives are not more popular? Everyone seems to use active and seems more commonly made as well.

Passive preamps are more difficult to get properly integrated because of the potential impedance mismatch. A mismatch that can also vary by volume setting.

Also, without active input/output buffers, the individual components' circuit electrical characteristics will travel through the entire chain, e.g. the downstream amplifier's input circuit is "seen" by the DAC's output circuit. This in itself can make the volume settings inaccurate, in addition to having an impact on other aspects of the sound character.

Lastly, although this is probably less of an issue in my opinion, people do want gain on occasion.