Preamps built Into DACs

" All the available musical information is encoded in the digital signal. This includes all the timbre, body, spacial information, decay and what have you. "

I agree with this and part of why I think the potential for pure digital amps is huge even with audiophiles and that these will be the norm in 5-10 years perhaps.

"However for well-designed DACs with volume controls, even these will be crushed. There are only a couple out there that accomplish this BTW, so it is likely that you have not heard them."

Steve, please list or reference if you have already.

Thanks.

Keep in mind the VC is only part of the design. You never listen to just the VC. There are very good DACs with analog, digital and hybrid VCs. It is conceivable a very good dac that has a digital VC could be improved upon by making it hybrid or analog, but at the end of the day you are buying a DAC/VC package and system performance matters. Also keep in mind some DACs are now 64 bit, theoretically making it possible to control volume in the entire range digitally without any loss.

Some examples:
Hybrid: Weiss (and probably Steve's Overdrive)
Analog: Aesthetix, MSB, Theta
Digital: Bel Canto, PS audio, Berkeley, DCS

Mapman - there are only two DACs that I know of that use the reference voltage to control volume (which actually connects the DAC line-out directly to the amps):

Empirical Audio Overdrive SE

I believe the other is a dCS DAC that is out of production

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Steve, DCS latest gear has an all digital VC. Why would they have moved to all digital if they had a better mousetrap before? Given that their latest "stack" sells for over $100K I can harldy imagine they did this to save cost.

I have a hunch the latest digital technology allows for the design of a digital VC without any loss of resolution, while avoiding the signal degradation of doing anything in the analog domain. There is a guy in France that build the 64 bit TotalDac, that tried every VC implementation under the sun and settled for a digital VC. The 20K light harmonic Da Vinci is also a 64 bit all digital VC.