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

You make no sense, can't see the forest through the trees, as usual.

Like I said:
"We have the voltage from most sources at more than >2v.
Most poweramps only need less than <1.5v in, (some even 0.5v) to make them give full wattage output to the speakers." 

There is no debate at all, as any **** can see.
   
Cheers George 

What forest? What trees? You just explained why active pre-amps should be as rare as hen's teeth, but you can't seem to explain why the exact opposite it true. If gain in a pre-amp is that obviously bad, and there's no technical justification at all to have it, why is it almost always there? That's all I want to know. This money scam jazz isn't reality. 

My guess is that if you're buffering with active devices to ensure the broadest, most uniform compatibility, you might as well throw a little gain in too since the penalty is below the noise floor. 

Just for giggles I piped a source straight into my F5. Eh...  Nice to be able to do that since the amp doesn't have enough gain to fully exploit the power available. It sounded decent. Apparently the antique Marantz is fairly transparent. I definitely need about 6 dB of gain though. 

This is picking hairs and scare mongering, and just selecting a worst case scenario.

90% of amps are 33kohm input impedance or higher.

The impedance of the amps is not the issue. The impedance of a 10K control is. Per your post prior to mine:

It doesn't matter one iota where the volume control is positioned here, these figures have a perfect impedance match regardless of volume position. As do 90% of sources and amps out there when mated to ***10kohm*** passive volume controls.

*** emphasis added. With a 10K post, we can always count on the total load being less than 10K. At full volume it will be 7.5K, increasing to 10K at minimum volume in the example above.

Not to put too fine a point on it George, but your constant and false claims that active preamp manufacturers are only in it for the money is disingenuous at the very least; your remonstrations come off as hypocritical!

So how about you lay off? Others and I could have easily called you on it years ago; its become tiresome.