first time with seperates, please help!

[pne]

I've recently purchased a set of antique sound labs monoblocks that are en route to me, and now I need to look at getting some sort of preamp. This is my very first try at using seperates and I'm a little baffled what to do. I'm getting a toshiba 3960 soon for a source, I'm unsure whether to get a preamp, or venture into DAC's. If I wanted to spend around 3-500 dollars, and perhaps in the future use it as a head-phone amp, what should I get? I'll also be adding a turntable later on too. thanks guys.

 

[memepool]

preamp is probably a good move as the headphone socket is usually better than the one on a CD player. Also if you are going to get a TT then it's probably wiser to get a vintage preamp with a phono stage.
No idea about soundlab but you can pick up some nice Naim preamps from the 80's for 200UKP or less with lovely phono stages. Not sure if they have headphone sockets though.
NAD is also worth a look as they have a pre-out on their old series 20 integrateds which means that the power supply would just feed the headphones and phono stage as obviously the poweramps have their own.