i was not daisy chaining.
guitar – preamp – mixer = very quiet
guitar – preamp – holy grail (with its own dedicated power supply)= a white/pink noise addition…now i am not talking about super loud, but it definitely added a hear-able noise to my signal (not 60 cycle) – hiss

to compare i tried hooking up the same setup with my lexicon lxp-1 and there was no added hiss or noise that i could hear