How much do I need to spend to get a preamp that sounds better than no preamp?

kosst, he has many followers......geez,,,you are one of them. He never designed a product where someone could not use it. He caters to a wide variety of listeners, which is interesting because he almost designs for himself, going after his holy grail in design. As I see it, to listeners wanting the virtues of tubes, but want solid state, and has accomplished that. You just seem to be making fun of him and not giving the man any credit. Who is bigger than he in the diy world, and so generous with his knowledge. This is how I see it. 

@mrdecibel

"First Watt exists because I wanted to explore a variety of amplifier designs in what I think of as neglected areas - amplifiers that might not fit into the mainstream and are probably not appropriate to my more commercial enterprise, Pass Labs.

With oddball characteristics and output power ratings of 25 watts or less, First Watt is not for most people. If you have efficient loudspeakers, listen at reasonable levels and are obsessed about subjective performance, then you probably have come to the right place."

You have no clue what you’re talking about.

So far as I can tell, and by his own words, he's not groping at emulating tube sounds. His SIT amps kinda sound like triodes because of the gain character of the devices, but that's about it. Pass Labs gear is the broad appeal stuff. Amps and pre-amps that will drive anything. That's not what the FW stuff is. The most broadly appealing products from FW are the Aleph J and, you guessed it, the F5! All the others require special consideration. 

kosst, go away, where ever you go angst follows.   

The same goes for this Aleph L preamp it’s one of his favourites, and it came to us audiophiles when it was needed, as he said "we way to much gain in our sources and amps" so it’s not needed at all in the preamps.

And as you can see in the link the Aleph L in red, it’s a direct path from input to output with nothing but input switch and resistors ladder switch in the signal path, only when the head of the volume arrow goes to the left of resistor marked RV6 does this passive become active. https://ibb.co/j8uwJn

And as he states in the specs of the user manual
https://www.passlabs.com/sites/default/files/alman.pdf
"It’s Distortion at full is < 0.1 % THD," and below 3’oclock it becomes passive.
"The sound is as pure as you can get. The distortion and noise figures you will get at this position are not easily measured."

He also asks you to perform an experiment to see if you can hear the differences the active stage makes when it comes into the signal path above 3 o’clock from being a passive state below 3o’clock.



Cheers George

@georgehifi 
What your saying makes no sense. No matter how you try to reframe the man's words to fit your imagination of how it works, you can't avoid the fact that the active and passive lines are parallel and share the same ladder. The measurements say so! How else do you explain that much distortion in what you're claiming is basically a straight wire? The only explanation is that it's from the gain stage. .01 or .02 % typical distortion, the actual fact isn't important. The magnitude of it tells you something. It tells you at unity you're using some gain. 

I’m over you. Go back to your F5 with high gain active preamp and keep pushing it, because you can’t use this Aleph L when it’s at it’s best in passive mode, only maybe after 3 o’clock, and as Nelson says you’ll take a sound quality hit.

And please stop putting **** on the man, your not his **** ****, and never will be.

Cheers George