I have heard that the best way to improve any linestage is to remove it. The maximum sensitivity of a standard CD player is about 2 Vrms, so it matches perfectly well with that of power amps. Don't know about tuners though. I don't quite understand why so much effort is spent to put expensive impediments in preamps. It seems like it would make more sense to standardize all sources to match power amps.
I have three inputs: a cd player, a tuner, and a turntable. I have a preamp made for vinyls. So, my question is could I just get an input switch followed by a volume control and call it a preamp? Will this work? For some reason, my amps sound sooooo much better when I just hook up a source directly. Even my puny iPod Shuffle sounds good. Any thoughts? Thanks,
-Min