There are a lot of good suggestions. My suggestions are:
1. Get rid of the Monster cable, my god, you have a great system, this will give you a serious improvement.
2. You are kind of waffling between preamp and CD player. I think you should consider a CD player with vol. control, such as Wadia. The critique of these are that a low volumes they lose resolution. With your inefficient speakers, you will not usually be at the bottom of the volume range so you can really take advantage of "1 less link" in the audio chain.
Anyway this is just something to think about, plus you get to lose a box to make it less cluttered.
1. Get rid of the Monster cable, my god, you have a great system, this will give you a serious improvement.
2. You are kind of waffling between preamp and CD player. I think you should consider a CD player with vol. control, such as Wadia. The critique of these are that a low volumes they lose resolution. With your inefficient speakers, you will not usually be at the bottom of the volume range so you can really take advantage of "1 less link" in the audio chain.
Anyway this is just something to think about, plus you get to lose a box to make it less cluttered.