Do I really need a preamp?

Marqmike, I have always seen it as a statement of how bad many active line stages must be for a passive to beat them. I can't use a passive in my system- the result would sound broken- no bass, no impact. The active preamp I use has more detail as well.

So much depends on setup! My interconnect cables are fairly long, something that is not a good idea with a passive. I find though that by keeping the amps by the speakers and the speaker cables short that I get a lot more resolution. The front end equipment- preamp, tt and digital, reside on an equipment stand that is located in a room nadir where there is the least bass. It is also not too far from my listening chair.

The problem you are usually facing with passive controls is the interconnect cable. An active line stage will usually be less sensitive to the cable. In fact if done right, the active line section will control the cable so well that it will have no sonic effect at all.

Passives OTOH require that one be very careful about the cable. Some passives are lower values, such as 10K, which make them less cable sensitive but then you have the problem that not all sources can drive the 10K properly.

I have presented some of the math about why passives can put you at a disadvantage elsewhere on this site, and the math shows that the quality of the control has nothing to do with it.

This is not to say you can't get a passive to work quite well, just that you do have to be careful and results vary quite a lot. Generally speaking though, it means short cable runs.

'Just get it right' is indeed excellent advice.

George is mostly correct here, just watch out that some solid state amps have a 10K input. 47K is not a standard.

Yes, George, John may well have stated that. I gave up believing everything I read in Stereophile decades ago. If a tube amp the input impedance can be set almost arbitrarily but most manufacturers go with 100K and I have seen some that are as high as 1 Megohm.

For solid state, 10K is usually the bottom end of the range and 100K is the highest, most likely an amplifier with FET input. Dynaco built their PAS3x to be able to work with 10K. ARC OTOH does not expect to see less than 30K with their preamps. We build our 2 bigger preamps to be OK with 600 ohms and our smaller preamp is good down to 10K.

Bottom line is its all over the map, Stereophile notwithstanding.