Line Stage Preamps that blew you away $2500 Edition

Can’t recommend Rogue Audio highly enough, awesome sounding gear. 

I think you could put the Schiit Freya + on your list.  Quite a bit below your 2500 price range but if you put some nice tubes in it, it really comes to life.  I have both the Freya + with CBS Hytron tubes and the Benchmark LA4 and I prefer the sound of the Freya + with of course the tube circuit engaged.  

Popular opinion suggests a linestage should do little other than provide source switching and volume control. It should add/subtract nothing sonically, and just be a transparent conduit between a source and amplifier. That specification may or may not suit your system. If it does, then a Wyred 4 Sound STP SE with level 2 upgrade is the closest thing I’ve come across to achieving those goals.

It isn’t very sexy, but boy does it sound like nothing.

these days, with very pure sounding dacs using built in volume controls, it is very easy to test and hear the effect of a linestage interceding between source and power amp

there is no linestage, tube or ss, active or passive, that sounds like nothing - there is always a change, a difference

just like there is a difference if one changes the interconnects

it is never the same, one just needs to decide if the change is positive or negative for oneself

@jjss49 - so true, and even adding one of the best implementations of a DAC volume control can change the sound of the DAC, as I learned when I owned both the Metrum Pavane (no VC) and their Adagio (basically the same DAC with VC)