I'll Second a Vote for the Preamp
I think its a fairly well-founded principle that the further up the chain you make an improvement the more significant the change in sound quality.
I am an incorrigible modder. Always trying something to get that last percent of improvement by changing caps, resistors, tubes, wires--whatever. In my last go round when I got the improvement bug I found myself spending about 75% of my time analyzing and tweaking my tube DAC and 25% on everything else. I'm convinced I got the greatest amount of improvment to system sound from the work just on the output side of that DAC and a little bit on its power supply.
Of course this is not my brainstorm. Probably anyone whose played around with building or modding audio recognizes that any improvement that you do upstream will be carried through and magnified by the rest of the chain. Also holds true for inside each component. You can usually get your best bang for buck by looking to improve things early in the signal path of an amp or preamp, for instance.
But yeah, definitely the Preamp!
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