basic passive preamp

I concur with the Mccormack Micro Line Drive preamp, own one and it is spectacular. The passive side provides dynamics like an active pre would deliver. The active side provides up to 12 db of gain and it is very good sounding as well. Steve's amps are designed to be used with passive preamps. I still own The Mccormack DNA-1 Rev B after all these years.

Thank you George for the heads up on the op amps and if a upgrade there is still available it would be worth looking into.  Let me pull a statement from Stereophile worth repeating: "The task of the designer is to come up with a preamp circuit that does the least damage to the audio signal, then add the necessary preamp functions in such a way that the purity of the signal is not compromised".