And Al, a source that gives out 2v is always going to give it out, even if you shunt half of it to ground because you don’t need it, because you have more gain to make it back up in the active preamp.Not all volume controls shunt signal to ground. The traditional volume control does not shunt any at all. But there are shunt-style controls and they have been around for a while. They rely on a resistor (usually of significant value) to be always in series with the source (meaning that the resistor affects the sound if not carefully chosen), so that when the volume control is shunting the resulting output, the source will not distort or be bandwidth limited (IOW not significantly loaded).
So the distortion from the source "whatever it is remains the same", it does not change because you’ve decided not to use half of it and shunted the other half to ground.
If anything shunting more of it to ground "could" make it distort more.
Now if the shunting element is the same value as the series element, the signal loss will be 6db, as the the output voltage will be cut in half (at full volume). With most passive systems this sort of loss is unacceptable- so the shunt portion of the circuit (the actual control) is often much higher than the series element; as much as 10 times higher.
The question then is - what is the value of the composite control? For example George has stated quite often that his controls are "10K" (10,000 ohms). If its a shunt-style system as one might infer from the above quote (since many controls don’t shunt the signal at all), then is he stating that the series element is 10K? That would allow for the minimum value that the source (DAC or CDP) would be 10K. This would imply then that the *actual* control is considerably higher.
At any rate, the statement in the quote above is problematic. The designer of a passive control I would **assume** would not want to give an active preamp an edge over his product by loading the source in such a way as to increase its distortion! If this point is ignored by some passive designers, it may explain why good active line stages can easily outperform passive devices in some cases.
FWIW, no *active* preamp loads a source in the way George describes; the volume control (if at the input of the preamp, which is a good place to put it) is chosen to be a value such that no source of any type will be challenged by it!! Again, this is just common sense engineering (much like the built-in headroom that all competent preamps and sources have), and I hope that this is obvious to anyone reading these words.