How much sound quality lives inside of voltage swing and gain?

Going to try and tie together a few thoughts as it relates to both tubes and solid state.

I was thinking about how much overall sound quality is tied to correct gain structure in a system and particularly the lack of front end gain and the reliance of establishing voltage swing further down the line.

Take tube preamps of old (and some new), the kind that can output more than 10, 15 even 30 volts before any amount of significant distortion. A principle Nelson Pass used to his advantage with the F4 amp. I will dovetail this with the suggestion that a big reason tube circuits seem more prone to tweaking via boutique parts would be because of those inherent larger voltages impacting the size of the components and thus more of the materials and composition of them acting on the signal. Transformers for input, output, and coupling invariably have an effect but there are few SS designs to compare that. Also a big reason I plan to build a Firstwatt M2 or F6 to hear iron effects in a solid state design.

Conversely some of the more well regarded solid state preamps, Krell Evolution, Pass XP, are also capable of driving difficult loads at greater than the nominal 2V needed for most power amps.

Is there merit to pursue all the system gain as early in the chain as possible? I think so and would like to try out one of the Okto Research DACs or other pro audio units which can output 7-8Vrms. Then use the preamp as a buffer or for a bit of gain followed by a lower gain or purely current drive amp.

A front to back approach would also alleviate noise issues as a quiet circuit with lots of output would eliminate the compounding effect of downstream gain which may only be discarded and handed more noise as it moves through each component.