Preamps built Into DACs

Charles1dad, you said it very well and my experience is the same. No active preamp in a system is wonderful sounding to some, but I have always found the resulting sound cleaner, lighter and lacking in body, weight, natural tone and impact. No active preamp systems seem to provide more detail and can certainly be quieter, but over time I became aware that the perceived transparency and detail was really a result of other important musical cues being missing.

Threads like this make me laugh.

Even if you choose to go "no preamp"... there is still a preamp involved!! It's just a lower quality preamp, tagged onto the digital circuitry, sharing the same power supply as the digital section. No thanks!

Do you really think that if you put the circuitry in the same box as the transport/DAC that somehow it magically eliminates preamp circuitry?? Nope.

In that price range? Not much.

Hk_fan, in the case of digital domain volume control this is certainly not the case - you do in fact eliminate the "preamp circuitry" entirely. I don't know precisely how Empirical Audio's and Weiss volume control work, but I suspect they also eliminate circuitry and implement VC through a fundamentally different architecture.

So I ditched a $10K 2 box preamp (Modwright 36.5 LS/PS) in favor of a digital volume control, simple because taking it out sounded better to me.

Here is another consideration. Price / performance. Let's say you have a 4K DAC with a build in volume control, and you have $10K in the kitty for an upgrade. You can either buy a $10K preamp and put it behind your DAC (throw in some money for cabling too), or you can buy a $14K new DAC with volume control. In my experience the SQ improvement per $ of the DAC upgrade will be substantially higher than getting the preamp.

Again, I am talking from experience not theory. I recently spend $10K on upgrading my DAC and have fiddled with various preamps in the $5 - $10K range, and there is no comparison. Unless you have analog sources, preamps are dead end technology, and will eventually be replaced by the VC build into DACs. These DACs will also serve as the digital switching hubs. Some are integrating music servers, some will have digital room correction, cross-overs etc.