Dan D'Agostino Momentum C2 Z Preamplifier

A preamp built to add nothing to your music except more of it.

Part-Time Audiophile's Mohammed Samji noted that "dynamics — especially micro-dynamics — benefit noticeably."

What Hi-Fi called it a preamp with the potential to double as "a dream digital source."

The best preamp is the one you forget is even there — one that hands your signal off cleanly, with nothing added and nothing lost. That's the entire mission behind the C2. Its complementary four-circuit input stage, inherited from D'Agostino's flagship Relentless preamp, uses four JFET transistors working in a push-pull arrangement to raise input impedance and drop the noise floor, so quiet, low-level details — the ones a lesser preamp buries — come through intact.

It's also quietly one of the most flexible preamps D'Agostino has built. A hidden front-panel headphone jack runs off its own independent amp circuitry, so late-night listening doesn't mean routing through compromised circuitry. An optional Digital Streaming Module turns it into a genuine high-res source too, with native Tidal, Qobuz, and Spotify support, MQA decoding, and Roon Ready certification — up to 32-bit/384kHz PCM and DSD256. And if you're building around D'Agostino's newest Momentum Z amplifiers, the C2Z variant is voiced specifically to deliver the extra current those amps are designed to take advantage of.

Everything runs off its own isolated, separate-chassis power supply, so the delicate preamp circuitry never has to share space — electrically or physically — with anything that could get in its way.