I'm considering replacing my passive preamp with a tubes. Is it worth it?

 @amritash what do you feel is missing from the sound coming out of your setup?

@amritash Interesting. Were you streaming (selecting your Node as output) from Tidal, or using the headphone jack from the iPhone as an input to the Bluesound? Considering that the stream should only be data and the Bluesound was converting to digital and amplifying, then I don't know how the quality should have been different from the 6 to the 7. If you were doing this with a bluetooth adapter for Bluesound, then it would be a much different story as iPhone doesn't support aptX, so that means that it is getting processed by the iPhone's DAC and voltage before streaming out, and that would be why the iPhone 6 sounds so much more inferior to the iPhone 7.

Outside of the gain issue, I think more detail on where you think your sound can improve overall (do you feel that specific tones are missing or too shrill? bass too sluggish? etc) would help understand whether an active preamp would help.

I'm a big fan of tubes, but it's also a pandora's box... one that has allowed me to really fine tune my sound, but also spin my head in circles at unnecessary times.