@1234VICE I'm not sure I understand your explanations it seems to me that you are completely disregarding any music recorded at 24bit, as if that is alien. Maybe 24bit does not feature in your world, but it does in the real world.
I can elaborate, please try to keep the conversation civilized though. If a preamp and 24 bit recordings makes you happy go for it, I am not plotting some scheme to sabotage your listening experience.
I few reasons why I think that resolving 24 bit quantization noise is unpractical:
-As mentioned by oktoresearch in this thread, the environmental noise in a typical house dwarfs the analogue noise by ~70-80dB.
-24 bit recordings might have noise much higher than the quatization noise of the medium, so it is not sufficient merely to have 24 bit recordings.
-If the noise floor of the amp is higher than the analogue noise floor of the dac8 + the amp gain, the amp will be the bottleneck in all cases. If is not, it can still be the bottleneck at normal volume levels.
-The THD+N of your speakers will be the bottleneck of your equipment ultimately.
-Once you have tackled all these problems, the final blocking factor is human hearing.
You could plug in the dac8 to your amp and try to listen if it introduces noise by putting your ear against the speaker drivers. If there is noise, see if it lowers by unplugging the dac8. If there is nothing to observe, you can be pretty confident that you wont be bothered by the analogue noise of this unit at the listening position. After you go through these steps, you can safely consider that the dac8 volume control only affects output level, as the analogue noise is not an audible factor.