Dan D'Agostino Progression Preamplifier

The control center your amplifiers deserve — with a power supply that stays out of the way.

Reviewer Jose Victor Henriques of Hi-Fi News summed up his reaction in three words: "I was flabbergasted."

A preamp's job is simple to describe and hard to do well: pass the signal through cleanly, and don't add anything of its own. The Progression Preamplifier takes that seriously enough to skip negative feedback entirely — a technique a lot of preamps lean on that can also blunt some of the music's life — relying instead on a fully balanced, discrete signal path to keep distortion low the honest way.

Volume control gets the same obsessive treatment: instead of a conventional potentiometer, you get a stepped resistor ladder using precision relays, so the amp's bandwidth and response stay rock-solid no matter where you set the volume. The power supply, meanwhile, lives in its own separate chassis — shielded and isolated from the sensitive preamp circuitry — so what reaches your signal path is clean. Two Swiss-watch-inspired analog meters do double duty as both music-signal displays and volume/balance indicators, a nice touch of old-world craftsmanship on an otherwise thoroughly modern component.

Want to go further? An optional, field-upgradeable digital streaming module adds high-res digital inputs and DAC duties without needing a separate box.

This is the preamp for a system where you want your amplifiers doing exactly what you tell them, and nothing else.