Which pre amps do the least damage?

[Darren]

Hi Dave,
Happily my 777 has excellent protection circuits and no harm was done beyond a bang noise and a nasty smell. New fets are £1.25 each and will be fitted for me soon.

[Alan Sircom]

I could have fitted a U$10 Alps one, but that works out at around £25 extra on the final retail price.

Mind you, I am not sold on digital volume controls. Once you know how they chop bits out of the signal in order to reduce the volume level, it's hard to know if those chopped out bits had any relevant musical details in them that are no longer audible in the final reproduced signal.

Some digital volume attenuation systems work by oversampling the signal prior to bit chopping. This seems to work without removing musical detail. However, i've heard some good, some bad, and I'm not altogether sure whether that hangs on the software or hardware implementation.

[hifinutt]

I agree. I believe Hi-Fi Critic are comparing some transformer passive pre-amps in their next issue.

yes i am waiting for a review of the music first reference which i nearly bought recently

[hifinutt]

i personally think systems sound better with pre amps but intersting to read views of those who use their volume controlled dacs into power amps

seen a great deal of threads recently which suggest a pre is nearly always better to have in system
i recently tried my 3.3k dac with volume control straight into my power amps and yes it was very detailed but when my teen came in [who is quite a good judge of sound] he said dad wheres all the oomph!

also went over to a friend who was running a volume control dac into 2 monoblocks with b&w 803d in a very big room. wife there too who was a musician . the sound was analytical and deatiled but a bit fatiguing .
put the music first mark 2 into the system and the bass dropped, the windows started shaking[i kid you not!] and the soundstage went round the room. no longer fatiging and just brilliant. needless to say they bought a mfa a few days later

[Ali Tait]

Aye, an active pre often gives better impedance matching, which yields the better sound.

[StanleyB]

I experimented with an adjustable impedance bridge at the output of a preamp many nearly three decades ago. Might be worth trying to design a new bridge with the same functionality.

[Ali Tait]

Interesting Stan. What were your conclusions?