The Best Preamp is no Preamp?

I have to agree a great preamp will change and reveal what your system should sound like with the magic quality,  compared to just playing music nicely. I ran a parasound preamp( holo no real  sound was stale, dead sounding), then ran balanced xlr from balanced dac smsl to a old but nice anthem reciever amp( cheap way to get great volume control but no real magic to the sound but nice for cheap).

Then ran a conrad Johnson pv11 with tubes but no xlrs, opened stage, could hear separation better but not coherent, was happier but still missing something. Then bought audio research ls17, omg wow drop your jaw. This was use as reference for reviewers 10 years ago and I know why. 4k or 5k new. Run fully balanced smsl to audio research ls17 out to jeff rowland class a amp to 1.6r Maggie's.  Wow the sound went holographic, live sounds amazing, can hear all instruments  in sound stage but sounded musical, and bass tightened up so much and hit harder, so it's a journey but preamps can take, control, and pull everything  together to sound amazing.

You could go with just a control amplifier. 

Using an AVR for pre amp, says enough!

Bought a Carver TFM amp in the mid 90s. Sounded great with CD player going into it directly. I used the gain knobs on the front panel for each channel as volume knobs. Sounded clean.

Sometime around 2008 I bought a new NAD preamp...entry level stuff @ $700. I was expecting to lose a little resolution going into the Carver. Sounded soooo much better. More body, more bass...it had this softness and smoothness. It did not make sense at the time.

I had to turn the gain knobs on the amp all the way up to max (as recommended by the Carver manual) to use a preamp. I thought it was going to blow up...but it sounded beautiful.

The class A gain stages in preamps are designed to handle very delicate signals much better than the gain stages in your average amp.

Working Audio Engineer here. There are three functional ranges of signal:

• Mic Level - This is the miniscule signal that comes from a microphone. It’s tiny! That’s why microphones are run into preamps. The preamps job is the amplify the signal to:
• Line Level - This is the regular, useable, routable signal bouncing around a mixer, compressor, EQ, ADC, etc etc etc, including your DAC. It’s strong enough to power headphones, but you aren’t really gonna move speakers with it. That’s why you feed your line level signal to a speaker amplifier so you get:
• Speaker Level - This is when you’ve got serious juice and could do some damage if you aren’t careful. Whether it’s 20W, 200W, or 2000W, you’ve gotta make sure you are sending the right level to the right gear or you can blow things up.

So... No, you don’t need a preamp. Your DAC is already outputting a Line Level signal, which is exactly what your speaker amp expects. Why add more gear, more noise, more devices to the signal? Could it help - maybe. Could it hurt - definitely. Sound reinforcement systems don't have pre-speaker-amp "preamps" as a concept even.

(In case anyone is wondering, my at home rig at the moment is a Peachtree Audio Nova125, which has an integrated USB DAC. It's the only unit between the computer and the speakers.)