My Stellar GCD sounds really good. What I think Paul is saying is that if you add a $6000 preamp then it will be better. You would hope for $6000 it would sound better. My advice would be to be sure your main speakers are the absolute best you can afford. Really good speakers sound better with a $100 Craigslist receiver than not so good speakers with a Stellar stack. Get both if you can.

@@thomprd , Ok good to know , I should have been more specific, I have a fair amount of speakers, but not had any luck with surround sound , I have some NHT2.5i and 1.5i , along with some R100s and a set of Denon bookshelf speakers, I was just going to give up on the "in the box" type of home theater Yamaha set and replace it with a 2 channel because I can't get good sound out of a standard home theater set.

Tube circuits typically have far higher distortion than modern solid state circuits.

@@69eddieD that is good distortion.

Because then it is one less piece of equipment to sell. :)

@@gasgasgas most people have a mortgage to pay. 😂

I disagree. They have very good sounding "budget" speakers. When you hook up higher end equipment to them, you bring out the best in them. Most people must build a system, they can't afford anything close to "high end" all at once. Building a system to match your speakers is probably ideal, but the argument goes both ways. You wouldn't want to hook high end speakers up to budget gear either in a perfect world. To me it's part of the enjoyment, getting the best out of the equipment and actually hearing the improvement as I add/subtract components. I have decent stuff, but I always attempt to upgrade to much better equipment if I change something, that takes money and time. A mixed up system can be really good, you have to look at it as a work in progress. IMHO.😁👍

Saved me from some writing there!

dragged.

John Rest assured the preamp does not actually make the signal closer to the original but rather adds some noise and distortion to it. Preamps can flavor the sound e.g. if a tube is involved some even order harmonic distortion might make you feel the sound is more musical with more ambience. Personally I prefer the cleaner and more audiophile direct sound without a preamp.

Yes, probably just a matter of taste.

A "passive" preamp can degrade the signal too, primarily because of stray capacitance effects. To avoid this, you can use a lower value potentiometer (say 10K instead of 100K) which can overload your source and significantly raise its low frequency pole. I build buffered analog potentiometers. I use ultra low noise op amps and resistors. These buffered potentiometers present a constant, appropriate load impedance (47K or 100K depending on application) to the source and can drive a very long cable on its output with no degradation of frequency response at all. You simply can't do this with a so-called "passive" preamp. Passive preamps degrade "soundstage" because they degrade frequency response. This is an observable, empirical fact. You can use my buffered potentiometer as a line driver if need be. It greatly mitigates the effects of stray capacitance.

Eddie X .You are stretching my technical understanding a bit here I'm afraid but isnt a buffered potentiometer with op amps effectively an active preamp ?

And an amplifier can be integrated, like i have. Suppresses sound better but cost more

Lo mismo pensé!

I am skeptical about getting an answer.

Preamps also provide a low drive impedance for the cable, which mitigates signal degradation from stray capacitance.

I'm sure everyone would love the know it all here to build us his perfect dac preamp.

Danny Woods Companies making pre-amps will tell you that you need one.

i know i am still a beginner so I'll mention my story take it with a grain of salt so last year my av died and i got a denon poa t2 poweramp in a pinch it sounded much better than my modern av so i was curious at this moment i didnt have a preamp so was looking around for one that fit my needs which was include a subwoofer out 😂 so i got the emotiva pt100 but it arrived faulty and when i saw pictures online of the internals i wasnt inpressed so i was like ahh oh well probably wouldnt do much apart of give me volume control (at this time i had it pluggef into my pc and used windows for volume control ... yesterday i got the Denon Avp a1 preamp processor and hooked it up the internals looked so beefy but i didnt expect much yet everything did sound better the mids especially were in the best balance ive heard on any speakers so i was like whaaat then i realised it almost felt like the room was the speaker and this is something ive read about and never understood so although I haven't experianced a proper dac other than whats in the pc motherboard i can definitely say they can add something positive it does sound how i imagined it to sound not overbassy or underbassy not low on highs everything is perfect bare in mind my setup is in my bedroom so not spaced out perfectly yet the next step is to connect a subwoofer but yeah preamps when made decent can definitely be a positive oppose to directly from a pc my equivalent to a cheaper dac its a modern pc with the sound chip portion on a seperate section to the rest of the motherboard and yeah generally never had an issue with it but i have fallen in love with this setup i hope it has decent subwoofer management

@@akeelshah7904 There is no reason why adding a preamp should improve the sound unless you rely on a poorly designed volume control elsewhere. PCs are often not good direct sound sources due to use of low-cost DACs and poor volume control (losing resolution). An external DAC with proper volume control is far better than using an external preamp.

@@ThinkingBetter im sure thats right that if u have a decent dac u can by like that but a decent preamp doesnt make ur sound worse it can improve audio... also there are benefits and drawbacks to both for example me being able to have the flexibility going from stereo to surround without having a sucky av receiver for movies and then great stereo... dacs are great options but preamps are also great