Consider your use of an outboard DAC to be the first violation of your "shortest signal path" ideal. Obviously, a single component with all connections and routing performed within one chassis would yield a superior signal path if length - or "shortness" - were all that needed attention. So, ask yourself why you chose an outboard DAC if the shortest signal path is your goal.

I would suppose your answer would be somewhat a combination of achieving the best sound quality and the lowest cost. And that would be your consideration in any situation where length vs. quality is a concern.

Ideally, you would want the most sophisticated signal path and not always the shortest just because it is the shortest. Let's say you have a GPS in your car and you put in a request for a route from point A to point B. If you simply ask for the shortest route, you may be going through small towns with their multiple stops and lowered speed limits. Or you might be sent along path with mountains and valleys, switchbacks and construction sites which will require more fuel and more time to manage. On the other hand, if you ask for the quickest route, you'll probably find a path that is not necessarily the shortest but rather the most efficient. That "most efficient route" is generally what you should be asking for when you construct your system lay out.

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Can someone explain to me how a configuration that uses an additional component like a preamplifier in the signal path could sound better then one with fewer boxes assuming similar quality components? Are the benefits in SQ great enough to justify the added costs of a

Jan's post is quite informative, and I pretty much agree with what he said.

Pre-amps have low impedance outputs that can drive long cables to a high-impedance power amp. In that sense, cable length would not matter much. IMHO, all else being equal, shorter cables would be preferred over longer ones.

I might add that my specific example with respect to cable length is with a phono cable between the turntable and the preamp. I change a stock PCV-insulated cable to a Teflon-insulated one (albeit with different wire construction too). The new cable is longer but sounds better than the PVC one. However, it may even be better still if it were shorter, but I needed the length to get from the TT to the preamp.

With respect to speaker cables, I have one 12-gauge pair that is 24 feet long, and another that is 10-gauge and 8 feet long. The 8 foot ones sound better, but I'm using the 24-foot ones because of the location of the speakers relative to the power amp. I could use a long interconnect (IC) from pre- to power-amp and the shorter speaker cables, but I haven't got around to making the long Teflon-insulated IC yet (I may not have enough wire stock left to do so after using it on other ICs).

Too bad we don't have a easy way to measure 'quality per unit length'.

When using unbalanced single ended cables (rca) sound quality decreases in general at about the ten foot range. The cable impedance and voltage drop plus cable capacitance (which is basically a treble roll off filter) begin to drain the life out of the sound. The cable itself needs to be very well shielded against hum and not degrade the sound quality or dynamic "punch" of the music pulses. So if it is rca it needs to be kept quite short in general.

The problem can arise that if you attempt to jam all your equipment into a pile inches away from your speakers so that your cables are short you will probably run into turntable feedback on loud bass notes etc because you are way too close to your speakers... Plus believe it or not even the tiniest piece of equipment near your speakers will shift the dispersion and tone quality of the speaker output. Gear reflects soundwaves big time. So ideally you want nothing, nada, zip near your speakers except perhaps sound deadening material or a benign reflective surface. So where do you then put all your gear?

In my case I decided it was a huge deal and put all my piles of gear in another room and then ran six balanced amplifiers mounted under the floor beneath my speaker arrays. Balanced line cables unlike rca cables can be used up to four hundred feet or so. It takes a little bit of an anal approach to start using balanced gear but sometimes it is the only way to yield the correct results.

Once the amps were out of sight under the speakers I was able to use very short length low impedance low capacitance speaker cables that were under 10 feet long. Separate 125 volt house current to feed the amps. Goodbye feedback. Hello clarity.

One thing that bothers me a lot about the arguement that all gear adds bad things to the signal is that it just isn't true. A preamp for instance is a control device of importance particularly when it comes to using the balance control to focus each mix in the stereo and monaural field. Tiny adjustments for each mix can make amazing improvements how solid the image is. Doing away with a balance control to me is like taking the steering wheel out of your car. Not so good when the road is curved IMHO.

Also there are cases where the buffering and impedance matching offered by an additional device like a preamp or a DAC may actually increase the fidelity of your playback signal. Gear is pretty picky about how it is plugged together. Simply adding another device is not all ways a prescription for a loss of quality.

Hope someone finds all this info usefull. In summation I would suggest that the overall integrity and competance of your particular system arrangement is something you need to really think about before designing just any old way of throwing stuff together. And keep studying how things are done at the professional recording studio level. Those guys know a lot about what really works.

Anybody talking all this s*^t should also be familiar with the importance of "gain staging" all the outputs as they pass from one component to another. As important as the actual cable is, the voltage "power" of the actual signal as it hits the input stage of the next piece of the chain---this makes another huge leap in quality occur if you can control it and keep your levels "hot" yet not clipping.

Yet another reason to not obsess over the "less is more" mantra... There is a ton of stuff at play in the typical system...I have a couple of DACs with output level controls usefull for just this procedure (one is the Benchmark, the other is a Lucid 96/24). I recently bought the new Bryston DAC1 and was upset there was no level control on it until I realized my preamp had an unused balanced input and the Bryston had a "hot" balanced output. This made the sound much more "alive." It was another way to gain stage for a better signal chain. It somewhat limited how much I was able to set the gain but offered at least a hotter alternative to the rca outputs. Make sense? Try it and see for yourself.

There's a potential for power amplifiers presenting a miss-matched input impedance to preamps, especially tube preamps. Given audio sales staff hardly ever warn customers of these risks a number of unlucky owners end up with otherwise excellent components that just don't get on with each other. Integrateds, unless designed by complete idiots, avoid these potential problems.
There's another concern I've always had that takes us a little bit off topic (sorry) but I suggest it's worth thinking about.
Take a look inside today's amplification gear and you'll often find a number of separate modules connected, even in high-end gear, with nasty little mulit-pin plugs. These happily oxidize out of site over the years. The subtle and often un-noticed degradation can give the impression newer gear is superior. But in truth all that's often required is a bit of internal spring cleaning to bring older amps up to standard. I'm unaware of this problem ever being discussed in the audio press.

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A preamp for instance is a control device of importance particularly when it comes to using the balance control to focus each mix in the stereo and monaural field. Tiny adjustments for each mix can make amazing improvements how solid the image is. Doing away with a balance control to me is like taking the steering wheel out of your car.

It depends on who you care to believe but balance controls are not ideal in a high end system IMO. Dual volume controls do the same job but lack any of the drawbacks to a simple balance control. However, on the subject of "focussing" the image, some sort of channel to channel adjustment is required IMO. Better a simple balance control than nothing.

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Thanks for the info.

I have read about some people having issues with certain components directly driving an amp due to it's output voltage either being too high or low for the amp it was pushing. I believe my Logictech Transporter is one such componet some have had problems with. In theory it would be nice though to have just the Transporter and an amp as I don't think the signal path could get much shorter without going to a fully integrated device that contained a good DAC along with an Amp.

I'm not a big fan of the design of these types of devices though as I feel they are placing too many sensitive components next to each other.

Having run a Boulder 865 integrated before my present set-up I sure couldn't hear any 'disadvantages' that are supposedly a part of such designs. However, placing an improperly shielded power supply section close to low level input stages can cause problems but this isn't a necessary part of integrated design.
Anyhow, we'd all better get used to the idea as one of the biggest selling class of components of late are CD -DVD player/tuner/pre & power amp/internet radio/hard drive etc devices all in one box.
From my experience we should worry more about running mains cables parallel to input interconnects before they even get to a preamp, power amp or integrated.