Best Sounding Passive Preamp

The best sounding with the purest signal path is the Axiom made by Luminous Audio. www.luminousaudio.com they are $160.00 with shipping in the usa. It uses caddock resister and is shunted to ground so the actual audio signal does not go through the potentiometer. The worst passive ive owned is the Creek and the adcom. They are horrible. Good luck

Look for an EVS(Electronic Visionary Systems)passive produced by Rick Schultz some years back. It retailed for around $450 new and it's about as clean and transparent as you're going to get.

I owned it, a couple Reference Line models, and an old McCormack or was it Mod Squad back then? At any rate the EVS used a pair of stepped attenuators for gain and balance and had a "straight thru" mode where the only thing in the signal path was a couple RCA's coming and going, a very short piece of wire and one or two resistors. Can't get much simpler than that. It was by far the best sounding passive I've heard.

Lightspeed Attenuator - do a little homework. You won't regret it.

http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=80194&perpage=25&pagenumber=1

Bent Audio and Placette make two of the best at reasonable cost.

I have owned a few passives: Bent AVC, K&K with S&B102, Placette RVC, and Goldpoint. All were bettered by the Lightspeed Attenuator - but all were first-rate and the tranformer and autoformer units are much easier to match with amps and cables. I also hear the First Watt B1 at RMAF and the system sounded quite good, but not my system or room so that is just a tentative observation; but how many things by Nelson Pass don't sound good?