If a best Pre amp should sound as if there is no pre amp then why we need it ???

mhardy6647

I misunderstood it myself until pretty recently. I've tried a lot of preamps on my big hifi & found that they added oompf but at the cost of some loss of transparency and some addition of edginess. I've been pretty darned disappointed with active preamps and had moved to a passive AVC and switch box several years ago.

Last November, we tried a $99 Bottlehead "Quickie" battery-powered preamp on the SE 2A3 amp and Duplexes... and it sounded amazingly good... it added considerable heft and authority (cojones) to the sound - but it was still smooth and sonorous. The passive was very musical but a bit too polite sounding.

I happened to have a pretty good sounding (but cheap and very unassuming) DIY preamp/headphone amp that I hadn't tried on the current configuration of the hifi -- so I tried it. It's not perfect, but it's very good.