best remote preamp for McCormack amp

Yeti,

Your question is wide open. We we could recomend at least 100 different preamps. How much money do you want to spend, and what kind of sound do you want?

I'm on my second SF line 1--a gold faced and at an incredible deal a few years back.   Around 600 for it.    Lots of good connection options as the Line 1 or the 2 or 3.   2 balanced inputs.  1 balanced op.  2 rca's pre out, Most pre's only have 1 pair of pre out.    tape connections as well as plenty of rca inputs.  I have 3 amps running off of mine.. Used separately and with choice of hi sensi speakers for the 2a3 SET that is a part of the system  . A MCcormack DNA 0.5 is one and the other is a Pass xa30,5.    The remote is my favorite of any I have used..  the aluminum hockey puck.    There is a good tweak for the dac chips for the volume control---replacing the Crystal with Burr Brown--I have  which ones written down somewhere..  2 Crystal chips are soldered to the board which means need to change over to socket type and there is no one around here that I would want working on it so havnt done the conversion.  Some units already have the sockets so its a matter of buying the Burr Browns which are only about 12 bucks apiece.

For what the SF Line 1 goes for that's a hard one to beat. The ModWright SWL 9.0 SE has a little better PRAT. Built quality on both are great. The remote on the SF does more; the MW remote only does the volume but it's a really nice sounding preamp that I used on many SS amps with no issues whatsoever. I've not heard a SS preamp new or used at that price point I'd pick over these two pieces.

There's a lot of very nice SS preamps but you'll have to spend a little more. The SF Line preamps really shine with NOS tubes so that can get a little costly. The SWL 9.0 SE only runs two 5687s and they're more affordable.