Directly from sound card to amp or to preamp first?

Hi all,

Nice to wind up here and I am glad to have found you all. My question is whether or not I have any sonic advantage of running out of my sound card directly into my amp, bypassing my tube-pre altogether. Here are my components: SoundCard: ASUS STX, PRE: Audio Experience Symphonies Plus, Amp: NAD 2400 THX, Speakers: Allison Fours (Woofers have been totally rebuilt and new Audax Tweets have replaced the originals). My AS pre sounds pretty darn good in my opinion but I know that it adds noise. I just don't know enough about the nuts and bolts of this audio game to say whether a preamp can do things such as open up the sound stage, tighten the bass, etc. Help me audioreview.comonobie, you're my only hope. :)

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Originally Posted by phileserver39

Hi all,

Nice to wind up here and I am glad to have found you all. My question is whether or not I have any sonic advantage of running out of my sound card directly into my amp, bypassing my tube-pre altogether. Here are my components: SoundCard: ASUS STX, PRE: Audio Experience Symphonies Plus, Amp: NAD 2400 THX, Speakers: Allison Fours (Woofers have been totally rebuilt and new Audax Tweets have replaced the originals). My AS pre sounds pretty darn good in my opinion but I know that it adds noise. I just don't know enough about the nuts and bolts of this audio game to say whether a preamp can do things such as open up the sound stage, tighten the bass, etc. Help me audioreview.comonobie, you're my only hope. :)

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Hi, phile'.

It is conceivable that you might have some slight improvement in the sound going direct to the power amp. On the otherhand you are using a tube preamp and, as we all know, tubes provide a certain quality to the sound which you would forfeit if you bypassed the preamp.

If you were to go direct to your amp, would you control the volume just using your soundcard's sofware volume control? This would work, but I don't entirely trust software volume controls -- you won't want to accidently send full volume to your amp. This is another argument for using your preamp. Futhermore if you have other music sources besides your computer you will be able to hook them all up to the preamp which presumably has multiple inputs.

Thanks Feanor for your prompt and courteous response. Yes, I am having to use my Foobar and Asus volume control to adjust the amplitude. After playing a few tunes through this new set up I am not noticing much of a gain. Acutally, the slight hiss that I experienced using the tube pre is still prevalent. I think I will just go back to asus to tube pre to nad amp. Thanks again!