Who is using passive preamps and why?

I am not aware of one single amplifier manufacturer that designs a matching passive preamp to compliment their amplifiers.

Three manufacturers were mentioned in this thread: Roger Modjeski - Music Reference, Jack Elliano - Electra Print, and Jeffrey Jackson - Experience Music.

Also, a number of manufacturers have implemented passive volume controls in their integrated amp designs. A couple that come to mind are Vinnie Rossi - Red Wine Audio and Paul Weitzel - Tube Research Labs. Ralph Karsten at Atma-Sphere offers a passive volume control upgrade for his OTL designs too.

I prefer the sound of an active preamp because it sounds like music.

Rrog, once again a dogmatic statement that fails to take into account all factors. If you want to say you've never heard a passive that sounds like music then it appears that would be true, but I guarantee you they do in the right system as many have stated in this thread. Are you saying you have golden ears and all of us, and there are many thousands, who prefer passives in their systems don't hear well?

Pubul, attenuate means to reduce or weaken so any volume control whether resistive or inductive is an attenuator. For some reason you usually see that term with stepped resistor controls and not with TVCs but they are both attenuators.

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Herman, part of you thinking is that passives in the right system are superior to actives, I wonder if it might also be true that passive resistor based attentuation is superior to tranformer or autoformer passive attentuation IN THE RIGHT SYSTEM, due to the much simpler design, or is the impedance matching that comes from TVC/AVC is simply almost always better in most systems. Modjeski, who I obviously think highly of, argues for resitor based attenuation, but that flies a bit in the face of what you will hear from most Agon passive adopters. Now Roger actually has an explanation why that I can't understand:), but it does seem to be based on some knowledge of electrical engineering of which I know almost nothing.

I think the key advntage of a passive (in the right system) over an active is it's not changing/distorting the
signal.

Sure, it is close to a straight wire. But, they must also have a disadvantage. Alber Porter wend from Placette to DarTzeel, but why? What does a great active linestage do that the passive can't? The answer is straigtfoward when it is an issue of needing gain or impedance matching, but he did not seem to need either in his original set up. However, I'm interested in getting some insight into the resistor versus transformer issue, on the assumption that most all of us are in no need of gain for our sources and that our amps are sensitive with fairly high input impedance.