soundcard / dac as preamp ?

[LesC]

what do you guys think of using the dac / soundcard as preamp ? i've used that setup for quite a while and while it was interesting, i did get tired of the equipment.

 

tried it with a xonar dx, xonar stx and bryston bda-2 plugged into a 2b sst2.

 

the bda-2 does not remember volume so if you turn off your equipment, you'd have to adjust the volume on your pc to get the sound back to listening level or you'd be pushing max volume.

[crisnee]

Some people believe in less is better (but of course the less needs to be high quality). So ideally you'd go from software with a high quality volume control to dac, to power amp to speakers. I sort of tried it for a time, but wasn't patient enough to form any valid conclusions.

 

Chris

[wgscott]

Another approach is volume control in the digital domain on a stand-alone DAC such as the NAD M51, so the DAC is the preamp. There is a thread on that here.

[Snowmonkey]

I tried bypassing the pre-amp stage of my integrated amp, but I couldn't hear any improvement in SQ. Also it meant I couldn't use my subwoofer without routing the signal through the subwoofer's high pass crossover, which seemed to defeat the purpose of eliminating the pre-amp.