Is my preamp useless?

I was just kidding. I didn't think anyone would take my comment seriously.

Its useless dump it ASAP,

I see a lot of good replies especially Ralph's from Atmasphere.
Got any idea on how you are going to proceed slanski62?

so How and Why would a active premamp, tube or solid state sound better than a more direct connection.

Would capacitors, opamps in the signal stage of an active be better than a single resistor, or similar ldr, autoformers?

Every opamp, resitors, capacitors sounds different, possibly changing the sound to ones preference. Adding on your favourite powercord, interconnects, vibration control on these active component adds to the variables you hear, hence the difference in sound.

There is no right which sounds nicest, but the less the variables and carefully matching wiring and connectors will give the best, less molested sonics.

If one has a robust sounding front end, a passive will give equal or less coloured sound. Impendence matching and possible size of speakers room etc will cause possibly a lack of gain required for the amp and speakers to perform or rather not sound thin or dead.

Conclusion would be a matching choice of factors.

The best part is passives are way cheaper and can provide just as good a sound as a $10k or higher preamp.

There is just so much more ways to tune the sound say with capacitors in the signal. Some sound clean or bright or warm or more open pr more distant, the list goes on...

Add the same capacitor in a passive and the traits will start to show.

^^ The quick answer is here:
http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?aamps&1426779273&openflup&16&4#16 (earlier in this thread).

The longer answer is that mathematically, no passive control is going to work perfectly as intended if it is driving an interconnect cable. The longer the cable the more noticeable the artifacts become (one solution is to build the control into the amplifier, which works very well). These artifacts can be so profound that a properly designed line section can actually sound more neutral.

Consider the source, which has an impedance, usually no more than a few hundred ohms and often quite a bit less. It is driving an interconnect cable. The lower the source impedance, the longer the cable it can drive and less artifact will be heard from the cable. If you install a passive volume control, essentially the source impedance driving the interconnect cable after the volume control (and the amplifier as well) is raised by the value of the volume control setting. This is often a multiple of the original source impedance.

The result is that the capacitance, inductance and resistance of the interconnect cable is no longer shunted by a low impedance (the source impedance). Instead the shunt impedance is much higher (the value of the control dominates this value and changes with the setting; you can see that as the control setting is changed it may be that the sound changes with it, and indeed many people experience this).

In this situation the resulting system is very sensitive to the issues of the cable and cable artifacts result. Anyone who has set up a successful system with a passive volume control knows this: the choice of cable in such systems requires careful selection as the cable artifacts are so easily heard.

There are other issues/phenomena; some are source dependent and others are amplifier dependent and so do not occur in all systems. Hence the extremely variable results that cause so many of these threads to exist.