smokester - very interesting response. I have been researching passive preamps of late and have been getting quite confused in the process. Resistive versus transformer-based versus autoformers, where does it end. Interestingly I had a conversation with the owner of First Sound yesterday as I was interested in their passive preamp. Bottom line, he suggested I look into one of his active preamps. Go figure... (no pun intended).
Best preamp is no preamp: always true?
There seems to be a school of thought that between two well-designed (read no major flaws) CDP and AMP, the best PREAMP is NO PREAMP at all (let's assume that the AMP has a sort of minimalist volume control).
Is this a solid and robust statement? What would be situations where this is not true (still no major design flaws)?
Is this a solid and robust statement? What would be situations where this is not true (still no major design flaws)?