The Best Preamp is no Preamp?

With respect to integrated amps, there are some that will put expensive two box solutions to shame. With separates I really believe some gear plays nice with each other and some doesn’t….synergy….   I have have people call BS on this but I believe it’s true.  With an integrated there is less cable, less connections, less to fail hopefully.   So with a good integrated the control and amplifier sections complement each other and are well sorted out.  I have nothing against integrated amps ….   Some awesome ones out there 

Nothing is better than nothing at all...

If i could save the money and go Passive or no Pre-amp at all i would have done this years back.

Whilst many on here claim no pre-amp is best probbably have not had very great pre-amps. You dont loose details by adding a pre-amp you gain more control on how that power amp works.

The sound becomes less Flat and more dimensional in space but if you going to use some El Chepo pre-amp then prob its best not to use one altogether.

At this rate i would say just buy Active Studio Speakers, Go Direct from DAC to Active Speaker and call it a day, you will get gobs of Detail and dynamics but at the expense of fatigue.

@soix 

I just re-read the post and realized the OP was using a damn AVR as a preamp.  And not just any AVR, but a Marantz AVR which, IME is one of the most veiled and colored AVRs out there.  So no wonder when the OP heard the detail and transparency of going direct to the amp he found it revelatory.

yup... that makes what might initially sound like a hard question a really easy one...

This has been an on-going topic for a very long time! @phantom_av makes a good point about the quality of the line stage; IME if a passive sounds better its telling you something about the line stage you used for comparison. IMO line stages have been in a sad state of affairs for a long time but if you get a good one there's no going back.

I don't like the problem were a passive sounds fine at full volume (which becomes the source driving the amp) but as you turn down the volume even a little bit the bass loses impact was well as the dynamic character overall.

If you never are able to turn the volume up all the way with a passive you may never find out what you are missing.

You can avoid this problem to a limited degree by using a control of a lower value for example 10K instead of 100K. But at that point a lot of sources will choke as they are not meant to drive impedances that low. 

In addition you have to keep your cables short and be picky about what cables you use. I found out decades ago that if you can place your amps by the speakers and run short speaker cables you get an instant improvement in resolution across the board- but only if you can get the signal to the amps intact. I ran balanced lines for that and so had no problems. So for the last 30 years that is what I've done, and no worries about what cable I've used. They are 30 feet long!

That simply isn't something you can do if you use a passive control. If you have a smaller situation where a meter cable will be long enough then if you're careful (or lucky) you can get it to work quite well. My bedroom system employs a passive control built into the power amplifier which IME is the best place to put it.