Quote Originally Posted by bubslewis
Just finished upgrading crossovers on Maggie 1.6's. Am now considering some of the downstream components. Currently running the maggies from an amp that's fed from the preouts of a Yamaha A/V receiver. For music I use "pure direct" which plays 2 channel and bypasses all sound processing. But also use the maggies as front speakers in an HT setup.

My Question is: Is it possible to put another (higher quality) preamp between the maggie amplifier and the (lower quality) A/V receiver preamp? So the signal would run from the source, thru the A/V preamp, thru a better preamp, to the amp, to the speaker.

If answer to first question is YES, proceed to Question 2:

Question 2: Could I expect any sonic benefit from doing this? Can an additional better preamp improve the signal being fed to it or just do a better job at accurately reproducing the original signal from the A/V preamp?

Additional question: Would a passive preamp be applicable in this situation?

I have to do it this way because I want to use the maggies for both music and HT. Hence I must employ the A/V preamp in order to accomplish this.
I run my CD player directly into my passive pre amp. I run the output from the preamp of my AV Receiver's mains into the passive pre also. When I want to listen to music via the CD I am bypassed entirely from the receiver. To run the mains with the receiver requires me to manually switch the preamp to aux. Not a terrible price to pay for having the 3.6's in the HT system.