Sound quality impact - preamp vs power amp?

@riley804   

preamp .

what good does it do to get a good amp if you are going to put a crappy preamp ahead of it ?

And you can easily make the counterargument that a great preamp doesn't help if your amp is a total mismatch with your speakers.  If we go with the assumption that amp-speaker matching has already been optimized then I'd agree that the preamp will be a bigger gain.

I think you're sorta asking the wrong question, so I will spin it differently.  For sound quality impact it's best to find an amp that has the best synergy with your speakers - so I'd focus squarely on the amp over the preamp but not just any outstanding amp but the one that allows music to flow the best from YOUR speakers.  This may not have anything to do with spending the most you can afford....it's about finding synergy.  My speakers sound best from a tube SET topology with a bit of wattage headroom.  I could have spent 3X on a higher end push-pull amp and it wouldn't sound anywhere close as good as what I have.

Speaker amp problems are speaker problems. Trying to solve the problem of a hard to drive speaker with an amp is a fool’s errand.

That is nonsense and plain naive. There is more to sound than whether there are "problems" associated with easy or hard to drive. Perhaps MC has never experienced wonderful amp/speaker synergy before. It’s not all about the speaker being hard or easy to drive, it’s about how beautiful is the sound that can be created. Just because a speaker can be driven easily doesn’t mean it’s going to sound good or even the same with amps of similar specs. Why on earth would my speakers sound better with a relatively low powered SET amp than a SS amp with three times the power and with the ability to double down into loads of half the impedance?

I don’t think MC has ever heard the lucid and textured midrange produced by some 300B/speaker pairings while other single-ended triodes will produce more clarity and beauty, and yet others will be richer harmonically if not as incisively quick. All with similar specs and all being paired with an "easy to drive" speaker. MC apparently subscribes to the camp that if a speaker is designed to push more power of out amp, creating louder sounds, then it must be better and will work best in all applications. If volume is all you require from your speaker then your listening priorities are light years away from mine, not to mention grossly unrefined. Perhaps when I was 13 yrs old I would have agreed with you.

the whole point of high end audio is trying to eliminate the weakest link.

I disagree.  I believe the whole point is to optimize the synergy among your components & room to best connect you to the music and stir your soul.

Thanks @co93 I’ve been thinking about picking up a used SIT-3 as I work at home all day and listen to music. I realize I’ve been putting just a ton of mileage on the tubes in my SET tube amp in 2020 and perhaps drawing more power than justifiable throughout the day when it’s mainly background music.

@co93   Just curious....what do you match your SIT-3 with?