help me to understand the gain

I completely agree with Almarg and Herman.

I would suggest selling the amp and replacing it with something that is less powerful and has lower gain.

An SET amp would be my preference.

Wow, thank you very much for all the inputs. It seems all the parameters affects the gain, and it sounds like really my system is lacking synergy. And there is alot of technical stuff that I don't really understand, please excuse me if I ask something stupid.

It seems the gain of the amp is not a published specification. I can only see it inside the Stereophile review under measurement section. How stupid ...

Almarg, thanks for your insight about bass roll off with attenuator. I don't have the engineering background to understand the correlations between impedance and all those stuff, but I will take your words.

I really want to keep the PrimaLuan preamp. I don't have anything technical to back me up, but in my experience, the preamp has a bigger impact to the sound then the amp. And I like how PrimaLuna sound, so, I likely will keep it.

I will try to connect the DAC directly to the amp, but I will missed the PrimaLuna sound.

About the option to lower the gain of McCormack, I think I won't go that path also. It seems I will need to send the amp to Steve, it is kind of a hassle. Also, my new Zu speaker won't need such high current, so, if it is not compatible, I may sell it out and get something else.

As people can see, my Maverick DAC has a volume control as well. So, I can lower my DAC input so I can make the volume know of the preamp within a usable range. This is similar to if I lower the volume in iTunes. My question is, how would this affect the sound? Will I run into the bass roll off problem like using attenuator?

Another option is to get another amp. I would like to try the SET amp. If I want to keep the PrimaLuna, what parameters should I pay attention to? I know most of them are pretty low power, but as said, power is not the real problem. I don't think they publish the gain info. Also, does the requirement to have input impedance > 100k Ohm still applies? Maybe more straight forward, what is your recommendation?

We have an amp that has only 23 db of gain. It works really well with ZU speakers too.

The problem you are having is classic- a DAC with too much output. I don't understand why DAC manufacturers do this- to me it seems like a fundamental misunderstanding of how power amplifiers work. There is not a power amp out there that needs more than 3 volts input, so why do you need 5 or 6V?

With that kind of output you have to attenuate the signal, either by passive control, digital volume control or something like the Rothwell attenuators. *All* of them rob the signal of musicality! With digital and passive controls, the higher you can run the control the better they sound (although for different reasons). So why force the user to turn things down so much??

Enough of my diatribe- you have gotten good advice from other posts here...

Sell the Zu speakers and get another speaker with lower, say mid-80s, efficiency. You'll get more of you're money back selling the Zus, they are a hot item compared to the McCormack amp. There are plenty of fine speakers out there that like an amp with power and current.

Gte357,
I`m a huge avocate for SET amplifiers(particularly with your speaker`s 101db sensitivity) however power and gain are`nt the same. you can have a low wattage amp with very high gain and a high powered amp can have normal or low gain. You must also factor in the amp`s sensitivity, for example 300mv is very sensitive and 2v would be far less sensitive. Your current system simply does`nt need the gain of the active preamp. Thus direct source to amp or a passive preamp. If you want to keep your preamp you`ll need an amp with much less gain than your DNA1.