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

george, you just proved Ralph’s point with help from Nelson. Noise is audible.

You need read and absorb better.   I did nothing of the sort, I have always said the only advantage balanced has over single ended connection is for the cancellation of noise with long interconnect runs.
Nelson Pass: " Except for noise, it gives pretty much the same performance "
And we should get back on the OP’s topic " How much do I need to spend to get a preamp that sounds better than no preamp?

The rest of your post is BS pushing your product.

As for me " pushing" my product sunshine, I have never bought it up in this thread unless asked specifically about it, all the other posts are for passive preamps in "general".
And why these days active preamps are not needed in many systems, as there is already too much system gain without an active preamp adding more gain. Quote: Nelson Pass again! my god he’s eveywhere!

Cheers George

Looks like someone didn't like what I posted and got it removed, it will come back once looked at by admin, with if any modifications done to it so it's not so insensitive to their feelings.

Cheers George

Too bad your thing isn't balanced. It really limits it's usefulness with a Pass amp. 

Too bad your thing isn’t balanced. It really limits it’s usefulness with a Pass amp

Not really as "my thing" as you so quaintly put it, is used with many Pass amps they have rca as well, and those that don’t my customers use these http://www.cardas.com/adaptors.php as Nelson said above about rca v xlr.
" Except for noise, it gives pretty much the same performance " and that noise is only becomes a factor with very long interconnects.

Nelson also made an un-named buffer for "my thing", (with over 900 world wide I think it deserves a name) the Lightspeed Attenuator to drive one or two models of his amps that are low input impedance amps around 10years ago on diyaudio, a few years later to be sold as the commercial B1 buffer by itself to be used with other passives preamps.
https://ibb.co/choBZS

Cheers George

Wrong and wrong... again. Sure, you can Drive a Pass Labs amp with single ended signals, but you get less gain, half the power, and ten times the distortion. You'd know that if you read the Su-Sy article. You'd also have known that there are definitely balanced amps out there, to, which is the ONLY way Pass amps with Su-Sy work correctly.

This is what the B1 looks like.
 https://www.passdiy.com/projects/images/content/bbp_1.png
That's not what you've got. That, and the schematic doesn't make sense. P1 isn't the volume control. It balances the voltage reference to the FETs. The volume control is obviously the LDRs that form the divider at the input. I don't understand why you keep posting that.  

Beyond all of that, Nelson didn't invent that topology. It's been used in dozens if not hundreds of input stages in amp and pre-amps for eons. You can find him saying that at Burning Amp 2015 when he discusses the nuances of that complimentary pair.