Do preamps have a material affect on high level sources?

There's been a heap of threads on similar subject. So reading this I again re-visited Direct vs. Active Pre-Amp.


As in all my previous findings a Quality Active Pre-Amp wins. Going Direct loses the emotion, soul, dimensionality, involvement, of the music. In fact I found going Direct became fatiguing after five minutes or so. A Quality Active Pre gets you closer to a Live Musical Experience.

I've done this experiment on numerous occasions over the years. Tube, Hybrid, Solid State, XLR, RCA, Active/Passive Speakers. Results have all been the same.

I've had a number of musical Pals place a Quality Active Pre. instead of Direct or Poor Quality Pre., on my recommendation. All have been gobsmacked at the Improvement in Musical Enjoyment.

I have had the opposite experience as initforthemusic. I hear more emotion, more soul, more dimensionality, more involvement, of my music. The start and stop of the musicianship ( prat ) has never been better. No more editorializing, no more coloration, so much more detail, in every category. Many people are afraid to give up their tried and true preamps. For $46., shipped to you from a California warehouse, is a single, one in, one out passive device by Douk Audio ( China manufactured ), an Ebay seller. After running my Luminous for about a year now, I wanted a passive unit for a 2nd system. This is an incredible little piece of kit ( superior, imo, to the Schiit SYS, in SQ ( which is good, as I borrowed one for a weekend ), providing you can live with one in and one out. An inexpensive way to try passive. I realize system matching is important. But my 3 dacs, several tuners and other sources all drive my many amplifiers I have, and my systems sound more " live " than ever. Enjoy ! MrD.

So as you can see this talk about active preamps being able to control the cables capacitance, is a huge furphy, thought up by active preamp makers to aid in their product sales.

Almost any audiophile on this forum has heard interconnect cables make a difference. In fact that is why there is a +Billion$/year cable industry in the US. This fact is incontrovertible.

It is the the fact that cables sound different that is why a good line stage is helpful- it is the artifact of those cables (IOW, not just capacitance) that a good line stage can control or virtually eliminate. Cheesy line sections and passive controls cannot do this.


If one needs an example of what I'm talking about, just look at almost any recording made in the late 1950s during the golden age of stereo recordings. At that time, there wasn't an exotic interconnect cable industry in the US (that wasn't to happen until years later when Robert Fulton produced the first high end interconnect cables in the late 1970s). Yet somehow Mercury, RCA, EMI, Decca and others were able to send delicate microphone signals up to several hundred feet apparently without serious degradation.

So apparently the technology to do that was around in the 1950s. A tech that is also not available to passive controls. It was done with active circuitry, with real engineering talent behind the design.


So when I say a 'good' line stage, I'm referring to one that is properly designed to include minimizing interconnect cable artifact as one of its goals. They are out there- you just have to look.

Atmasphere, can you name a few, as I am sure your preamps will be on the list ? Isn't that a benefit of true balanced designs ?

The balanced Backert Labs Rhumba would be a good example. Any preamp that supports the balanced standard would do the same thing. That is one reason balanced preamps can sound better- you don't hear the effects of the interconnect cable.