Look - some people are happy with passive pre-amps - that's fine. Other people prefer active designs - that's fine too. Please don't try and argue that passive is empirically "better". You cannot prove this - it's just your opinion (to which you are perfectly entitled).
I'll return to my original point - which I notice was immediately dismissed (too hard!)... Before you get to listen to your precious CD, the music therein will have travelled through many active amp stages (and probably no passive ones). Plus a whole bunch of fidelity-mangling devices (compressors, exciters, limiters, de-essers, reverbs etc etc etc) will have created the sound you actually hear... One extra stage of (comparatively) very high quality active amplification will make almost NO difference to your enjoyment of the music. This isn't just a theory of mine - it's based on direct personal experience. The things that really mess with the sound are the DAC (or turntable/arm/cartridge) and the speakers - the things where a real state change / paradigm shift in the "signal" occurs. A DAC renders the digital representation into an analogue one and the speakers turn an electrical signal into a mechanical equivalent. By comparison, applying a little (or a lot) of gain to an analogue electrical signal is not all that significant. Before anyone jumps to conclusions, I'm not saying all (pre) amps sound the same - they don't. My advice to anyone thinking of using a passive pre is...try it and see. -- Phil Leigh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Phil Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=85 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=25614 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
