Are Preamps necessary?

JW94055 is right; you will need a volume control somewhere, I would try a passive, in my case once you've tried a passive you will not want an active preamp. The active preamp will always be adding another step of separation from the music, IMHO.

Agreed with Xiekitchen... also with JW94055. You dont need to invest huge ammounts of cash to arrange a nice system, even at the price you paid for your current and respectable Yamaha gear, assuming it is a classical Natural SOund series and not something extravagant from the Far East.

My humble advise is for you to try to sell or locate your current system somewhere else and go for a HiEnd setup, many options are available at this forum, particulary if you are into Classical Music listening, just adding a preamp to your current setup will not bring any additional benefit.

Fernando

David,
I'm just taking a guess here but if you're able to listen to music right now that Yamaha amp is probably an integrated, in which case you wouldn't need a preamp because you basically already have one. That's just a guess, am I right. All a preamp constitutes, is a volume control, a source selector, and some minor amplification and buffering. An integrated amp is a preamp and an amp combined. I hope that helps and I apologise if you already know this stuff. I'm just guessing due to the fact that you're a new member, have entry level components, and the way your phrased your question.

Preamps provide gain and current drive, both of which are usually necessary with most amps to get the maximum dynamics out of them and ability to control volume adequately. Some DAC's, such as the Benchmark DAC-1 have active volume controls built-in.

With a high quality preamp the sound is fuller with a bigger soundstage. Driving a power amp directly from a CDP gives you a more transparent and detailed sound, but you will sacrifice some bloom and soundstage becomes more shallow. This appears to be a consistent finding to me.