Do they have passive 6 or 5 channel pre-amps

I believe this month's Stereophile has a sidebar about a Sony ES active preamp. It has 2 sets of 5.1 inputs and one set of 5.1 outputs. It apparently offers little more than balancing other channels to the front main speakers. Minimal circuitry with a supposed minimal affect on sound. It appears to be more of a "switch" than a preamp, though it apparently is not passive. I have found no info anywhere on the web unfortunately.

Here's the scoop: Placette (Gary Hamel, builder of one of the best passives)has said to a number of his customers that building a 6 channel pre (probably has to be active) would be too, too expensive. I wish he would - I have the Placette active line stage (2 channel) and now have moved to the multichannel XA777ES for SACD. I think Placette could sell as many as they could build if they could keep the price under $6K

Besides Accuphase's newly announced big buck 6 channel pre (active), there's the EMM Swithcman II, a professional pre that's utilitarian but is quite transparent (to the level of a good passive -- so much so that Sony used in their megabuck SACD demo). And Sony has just come out with their own 6 channel pre to compliment the 333, 555, 222 and XA777 multichannel SACD players. The new Sony TAP9000ES is availabe only in Australia and Japan now, but I've heard rumors of Nov. 15th for North America. Retail will be about $700 - quite reasonable for an ES quality component from Sony. Steropile (for what ever that is worth) gave it a provisional Class A rating in the September/ review when mated to a 555ES multichannel SACD. I have preorderd from oade.com and will post when I get it. --Lorne

Check with Placette Audio as they do some different things with passive.

I don't think one would be a good idea period, which is probably why few exist, if any (none to my knowledge to try an answer). In any system with a .1 channel there's going to be a rather long run of interconnect (line level) to get to the subs internal amplifiers and that's not easy on the source to drive, not to mention driving all the other separate channels. And with monoblocs becoming fashionable and all the weird locations amps (even non-monoblocs) can end up in a home theater, a passive linestage isn't even an option--a source alone couldn't drive alot of setups.