This has to be one of the very best solid state preamps.

Pass Labs: description: “The new XP-12 starts with a new power supply. It uses an efficient toroidal design with both an electrostatic and Mu metal shield along with vacuum impregnating and epoxy fill. This gives us a very quiet transformer both electrically and mechanically. The power supply circuitry itself is also lower noise and has additional filtering, a little more complicated but worth it. The XP-12  uses the single stage volume control borrowed from the XS line preamp. This gives us one hundred 1 dB steps with lower noise and distortion while removing some signal path parts. The gain circuitry continues to use our favorite transistors from Toshiba but has a larger higher biased output stage similar to the XS preamplifier auto bias. This makes longer and multiple cable runs easier to drive and gives us the advantage of simplifying our single ended output circuitry while increasing performance. Overall this makes for a quieter more neutral, musical and versatile control center for your system.” See http://www.passlabs.com/products/xp-12/ and the many online reviews.