difference between an active and a passive preamp?

There are a lot of caveats when using a passive preamp. As Elizabeth said, you have to make sure your source component has a very robust analogue output section with low output impedance. In addition, your interconnect lengths from source to preamp to amp (short as possible) and capacitance of the interconnects (lower the better) and the input impedance of the amplifier (higher the better) are critical as well. There are passive preamps made of pots, stepped resistors, LDRs, transformers, and autoformers. I prefer the latter three. If all of these are taken into consideration and executed correctly, a passive preamp is better sounding than any active preamp I have ever heard. But I have not heard the mega expensive $15k+ preamps like darTZeel, Atma-Sphere MP-1 with upgrades, etc.

Yea, I know about active buffer option on the Tap X. John told me the active buffer degrades the sound of the Tap X and stopped including them on his later runs of the Tap X. I think the buffer was an opamp.

Al, thanks. My understanding of TVC or AVC vs resistor/LDR volume control is that as you apply more attenuation, TVC will decrease its output impedance whereas resistor volume control will increase its impedance. That is one argument for TVC because your suppose to get better sound as you attenuate more with TVC, while you get worsening sound as you attenuate more with a resistor based volume control. At least that's the argument I heard, but I don't know if in practice this is true.

To be on the safe side when using a passive preamp, I would want my source to have an output impedance less than 500 ohm, source output voltage at least 2V (this also depends on the input sensitivity of your amp), my amplifier input impedance greater than 50k ohm, and total interconnect length from source to amp not longer than 6 feet. In my system, I have a autoformer passive preamp, USB DAC with output impedance of 50 ohm and output voltage of 2.5 volts, amplifier input impedance of 100k ohm (with input sensitivity of 1.25 or 2.8V depending on the amp), and total interconnect length of about 5 feet. This way I can have all the transparency, naturalness, and openness of a passive without significantly losing dynamics of an active preamp.

For example, if amp X has an input sensitivity of 1.25 V, 1.25 V from the source (eg,CD player) is need to achieve full rated power from your amp X. So if amp X is rated at 100 watts, it needs 1.25 V to produce 100 watts. If amp Y has input sensitivity of 2.8 V, then your standard CD player output of 2 V is not enough to get full power out of your amp. In this case you need active preamp, to provide that extra output to get full power out of your amp. Most passive transformer or autoformer preamp can provide an extra 6 dB of gain (stepped resistor, pot, or LDR based passives can't), so you can mitigate some of this. I'm not too certain on about how the length of the interconnects affects this. But I think longer interconnects will decrease the amount of effective volts the amp sees from the source. So I try to keep my interconnects as short as possible which also helps to prevent significantly losing high frequency response. If anyone more technical can find any error in my explaination, please correct me. I'm not that technical.

Ts0711, you have a very sensitive amp so it won't take much to get your amp to full power. However, I would think you would lose some dynamics and high frequency response with interconnects that long. Have you tried to get your passive preamp and source close to your amp so you only have 3 feet from preamp to amp and about same from your source to preamp? I would think you would hear a noticeable difference. Your present setup may sound good to you now, but using shorter cables may significantly improve the sound.

Although I have not heard the buffered passives Clio09 mentioned, the one's I have heard did not sound as transparent as the pure passive preamps. But this was a long time ago, and I don't even remember the brand of the buffered passives I auditioned. On my Bent Audio Tap X, I was thinking about putting in a Burson active buffer on the output of the Tap X, but this is akin to putting a transformer on a OTL amplifier. Seems ass backwards, but I've been known to do ass backwards stuff in the past.