A little story of my progress through Hi-Fi land...
When I was a kid in the early 1960’s my family had a mono Columbia "HiFi Console." It had a 12 inch woofer, midrange and electrostatic tweeter! A 10 watt mono amp and a record changer. It was very state of the art in 1958 when my father bought it. I would rate its HiFi grade around 80 points. It had real bass and could fill a room with wonderful mono sound.
One day my dad replaced the original record changer (and its ceramic cartridges) with a Dual 1215 turntable with a Sure M91. He also added a small booster amp to bring the M91 output level up to the correct voltage. It was an unbelievable change! Like washing the windows in an old house. I will never forget he put on Simon and Garfunkel playing Scarborough Fair/Canticle. That was my first taste of what an upgrade could do. I would rate that around 90 points.
I have been an audiophile for 55 years if you assume I started with that record player when I was 6 years old. I have worked in the industry in numerous capacities and was even the weekend manager for the AR listening room in Grand Central Station from 1973 to 1976 when it closed.
I owned and or touched lots of equipment over the years. I built and sold super high end systems for many years before moving to the computer software business.
I know this has been said many times before - The week link in any system will ruin the entire thing. Take a $50,000.00 system and feed it low quality source and it will sound like a big awful system.
Assuming you have fantastic source material, I would think the power amp would be more important than the pre-amp. Think about it, how often have you ever seen a pre-amp clip?
I have owned many pre-amps in my days. I have only been able to "hear" the difference in pre-amps on the most fabulous systems. The differences were very "subtle."
