The Best Preamp is no Preamp?

If you run short cables you can get away with this. But if you have monoblocks (which are useful for keeping your speaker cables as short as possible) then no so well. I've found that using balanced connections to the monoblocks and having short speaker cables got me better bass, more engaging midrange and easier to understand vocals.

You can't do that with a passive- it allows the cables to color the sound. Quite often sources like a DAC can't handle long cables either. But I've found over time that the quality of the preamp has an enormous affect- and the length of the cables has nothing to do with it. Some are terrible- and so using no preamp at all is better, and some are great and actually sound a lot better when used.

op

this, as you can imagine, has been discussed numerous times on this board

pls use search bar, find old discussions, which i believe you will find most informative 

@mikelavigne made a series of replies that i personally feel is the last word on the subject

Experimentation is good ;-) ..but limited to a specific combination of gear, especially the ability of the source to drive the amp…. That gear as Ralph astutely points out includes cables. Putting a super high quality attenuatior near the amp input is probably best. The comment about super short speaker cables is master class ;-)

You can get NOS Nobel potentiometers from Music Reference, search pot in a box,  

jim

I'm not a big fan of the "no preamp" school of thought. But I have had all manner of active and passive preamps come through my room and I am convinced that a well thought out system will benefit from some type of very good passive device. I've had autoformer, transformer,  and  conventional resistor based preamps but my favorite is something like the Tortuga Audio using light dependent resistors. This is about as close as you can get to no preamp, but solves the issues with component impedance mismatches.

The take away is when you have sensitive, easy to drive speakers, enough source gain, and components that play well together, a good passive preamp is hard to beat.

Personal Experience, Trying many possible methods DAC to Amps with various Dacs and Various Amps.

Final Conclusion: Pre-Amps is Required.

Some Dacs have Pre-amps built into them like Playback Design and MSB and various others. However much these companies claim their pre-amps are superior to use directly with Amplifiers the final results is never as expected.

The Pre-amp is the heart of the system, all devices are connected to it except the speakers. It either makes or breaks a good sounding systems.

A Tube Pre-amp injects life and soul into the system, iv not had much luck with SS Pre-amps.