Control volume with DAC or Preamp?

The nice thing about having volume control in both pre and dac is that it allows you to find out for yourself.

What you have is basically two preamps running in series into each other, who does wants to do this craziness. 🥴

When I did that I found that the pre-amp improved system performance in every way.

What you found is you preferred the coloration/distortion that way, that the extra preamp gave you. (you need to fix the sound of your source because you don’t like it)
Next you’ll say 3 or 4 preamps in series it sounds better 🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️🤦‍♂️or🤦‍♂️

Bascom King and many others have found the same.

Of course they do, they sell preamps 

George is omitting the rest of Nelson's comments when he makes that quote. He seems to do this as part of his 'product protection' program, since he sells (actually a very good, but also obviously not of his own design) passive volume control. Here is the rest of that passage, starting at exactly the point that George stopped:

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.

If you put a buffer in front of a volume control, the control’s low impedance looks like high impedance. If you put a buffer after a volume control, it makes the output impedance much lower. You can put buffers before and after a volume control if you want.

Ralph is product (his active preamp) protection mode, omitting the reason behind a "why" the "rare" times a passive "may not" be the least coloured, least distorted, and best dynamically

Only when there is a impedance mismatch which is maybe 5% of the time, when the ratio is lower than 1:10
 
As most sources can easily drive a 10k passive, and a 10k passive can easily drive power amps that are 33k or higher input impedance, most are, the industry standard 47k and most tubes are 100k.
Only some silly Class-D are 10k input, passives don't suit these, as to many tube pre's don't either

Cheers George  

Ok, There are circumstances where a passive may be best and ones where an active will work best. This based on objective as well as subjective reasons.   

I think it depends on the Dac.

I used to own the PS Audio Direct Stream Dac. Running direct to my amps it was a bit anemic.

Now that I own the Lumin X1 it sounds waayyy better running direct to the amps. I ended up selling my Ayre preamp. 
Which helped pay for the Lumin.

ozzy