I apologise in advance for a novice question, but I’m looking to learn and get more into audiophile equipment. My current setup is a turntable --> RIAA stage --> active speakers. My speakers (Klipsch R-15PM) actually have an integrated RIAA stage, but I bought a separate one because physical constraints forced me to place my speakers five meters from the turntable, which would be too long of a cable run for such a weak signal. So the seperate RIAA stage is feeding into the line level input for the active speakers. This setup has been working well for me, but I’ve been missing the opportunity to use headphones with my turntable.

I’ve already decided on the headphones and the headphone amp (Meze 99 Classics and Schiit Vali 2++), but I’m trying to understand how to set up the rest of the system. Does the preamp output on the Vali simply forward the signal from my RIAA stage without doing anything to it? In that case I can use the same setup as before, only adding the Vali between the RIAA and the active speakers. But if that’s not the case, and the Vali actually amplifies the RIAA output to a normal preamp level, will it still be possible to feed this signal to the phono line-in for the active speakers?