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That's what you get for thinking...

...mostly just more confused.

The problem is that you are thinking about the system and not listening to it. By *only* employing thinking, you are starting from the wrong place, so it is not surprising that you are reaching the wrong conclusion. In other words, if all an active preamp does is "attenuate and then amplify", then it would make sense to add dozens of them to get even better sound. Clearly this is an absurd conclusion.

But if you start by listening, you find that an active preamp *does* improve the sound (as so many other comments in this thread testify to). So the correct next step is to think about it and try to come up with a theory as to why.

Here's one possible explanation: all passive preamps have a relatively high output impedance, while all active preamps have a relatively low output impedance. We are typically talking about 2 orders of magnitude (100x) difference here. One could logically conclude that cables and/or power amps sound better when driven by a low source impedance.

This would also avoid the absurd conclusion that dozens of active preamps in series would sound better than a single one. This would also explain the comment in this thread that the active Placette (passive + buffer) sounds much better than the passive Placette.

Is this the real explanation? I don't know. But it is plausible, and it doesn't lead to absurdities.

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