Any quick look under the hood of truly high end audio components immediately reveals their design philosophy:  the highest quality of pure, simple, short signal paths w/o tone controls or other things screwing it up. One look at the above photo of the Nakamichi CA-5A preamplifier (The Nakamichi CA-5A preamplifier) illustrates this completely, and also shows off the build quality.  Witness the isolated transformer, simple high quality components, and exemplary design.  No more, no less…

As for the rest of the components?…  I want them to amplify the signal as accurately as possible and other than that get out of the way of the original integrity of the (minuscule!) analog signal path created by my 103R phono cartridge (The formidable Denon 103 vs. 103R low output moving coil phono cartridges – is there really a difference?…) or the (albeit more robust) signal from my very carefully chosen outboard DAC (Marantz DSD DAC)