Solman989,
In case of integrated amps you ought to figure that the amplification part does it all where the volume pot usually connected onto the driving stage(realy becomes active after all)
In some of the passive-stage integrated amps you may feel the lack of drive and controll f.ex. Creek 4330. At the same time I could contradict myself saying that it just hasn't enough watts, but after trying it to work as poweramp only with active drive it was way different:
Still lack of power but controll increased no doubt.
Another of my discoveries would state that you can add even a chain of preamps and you will gain even more and more controll but to the point where's your music would become overcompressed since every preamp would invert signal i.e. make a negative feedback level deeper.
Counterpoint power amplifiers have option to have a high impedance/sensitivity driving stage specially designed for the passive preamps. This driving stage isn't recommended for the best product performance to whoever prefers active preamplification... Which means that preamplification and driving stages should be just enough not to get high level of a signal compression and so I guess that hobbyist who's matching components should pay to some degree an attention to this factor such as a number of preamplification and driving stages of mainly separate amplification components.
