Preamps built Into DACs

I" can't help but wonder what my savings would be if there were no preamp attached to those units."

It's not about saving money. Its about removing a serious number of veils. Nothing quite like it.

I used a highly modified Levinson pre for years. Mostly wired with silver wire, point-to-point and lots of Black Gates etc.. Nothing like the stock ML. I though it was really transparent, until I developed a DAC volume control. The pre has been gathering dust for years now. Not even close.

The only thing I have found that approaches the tranparency and air of this is a good transformer linestage, such as the Music First. I actually use a transformer buffer now, using the Finemet transformer technology from Feastrex. Even better.

The only requirement for a transformer linestage is that the output drive on the DAC be sufficient. Op-Amp outputs can stay at home.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

There do seem to be certain components that manufactrurers love to combine and DAC Preamps is one of them. I am no EE and don't understand the allure but you do see a lot of them. Amp builders I have spoken to seem to get a charge (no pun intended) out of building preamps. The reason remains somewhat unclear but to the ones I spoke with it was the challenge of the circuit. I somehow doubt that is why, I think it more an economical one and we need a frank discussion of that.

Audio-Gd has several, this is his starting price point ($549 no remote, $599 with) they go up to about $1900

http://www.audio-gd.com/Pro/Headphoneamp/NFB-10.1/NFB10.1EN.htm
Tim

Preamps, great active preamps, are a must for me. Without it music is
simply not as musical to me. So preamp builders please build on! To my
ears a proper stereo system needs a great active tubed preamp.

To me, I would be wasting money on my system not having my active tube
preamp. So yes, stop putting a volume knob on all those DAC's so when I
buy one I'm not wasting money on that volume knob.

To each his/her own and this is just my experience and preference. Listen
on!

Many have ditched very expensive preamps for a well implemented volume control in the DAC(including me). Considering the amount of loss incurred in an analog cable and running signal through additional circuits I am not surprised.

To me there are no sacred cows in where to put the volume control (which is what we are really talking about here). I used tube pre, solid state pre and now the volume control in the DAC. Then there is the whole debate about analog VC and digital VC in the DAC.

I think the ideal VC implementation would be a DAC with a switch for 0db, -10db, -20db, -30db, -40db attenuation in the analog domain to match DAC output level with speaker sensitivity and desired volume level for the listening session, and then a digital remote control to attenuate up to an additional -20db. Wonder why no one has build this.