Tonymerritt said:
Can anyone help with whether a preamp is really needed in my set up?
I've got a Mac mini into a Cambridge audio DAC (no preamp in the DAC). I'm using itunes for my digitised music that is all on an external drive. If I connect my DAC to a power amp without a volume control can I use itunes to control input to the power amp?
Of course you can do away with a pre amp. Ignore the muddled headed thinking in the thread above.
As a general rule, the less links in the chain, the better. No pre-amp has zero distortion and zero noise, so including a pre amp in the chain will have a negative effect on the sound quality. Most users trade this off against the input switching and volume control features of a pre-amp - but if you dont need them, why have them?
Back in the glory days of Squeezebox, the software on the 'Transporter' streamer did have the worrying tendency to occasionally flip out and produce white noise at full volume. As a result, those driving power amps direct from their streamer would include passive attenuators (fancy name for a couple of resistors) to make sure that full output on the streamer didn't damage the speakers. This depends on the sensitivity of the power amp and the max output of the DAC / streamer - it may be that even at full output, the power amp would not be able to damage your speakers.
These days, streamers / DACs are much more stable - I have never had a 'full output event' in the 10 years or so I have been using a streamer. Personally, I wouldn't worry about it and would just connect the DAC to the power amp.