If you play your music between 10 and 12 on the d

Is this a question about the ideal impedances for the attentuator? I always thought rightly or wrongly that the attenuator performs best when it is past the 10 o'clock position - it is certainly true with a passive - not just a matter of loudness which depends as much amp and speaker.

I know that in a passive being beyond 12 is really recommended as the output impedance gets lower and lower. Not sure if this applies to actives, but I think it might.

Anything past 11 should be ok. Basically volume controls are not great when attenuating enormously. Some resistor ladders are very good though. Pots are usually bad at the extremes and it is better to play past 11 with 1PM being pretty much gauranteed to be good. Usually the problems are greater to Signal to noise and poor calibration in sound between le and right channel at low volume extremes...

If you have a stepped attenuator, you get better discrimination of levels if your "normal" listening level is around "noon", since each step is a smaller percentage of your volume than if the attenuator is just one or two notches up from its lowest setting. You also have a better signal to noise ratio. On the older Audio Research amps, which had level controls, ARC always recommended that you set the amp gain so that your pre-amp gain attenuator was somewhere around noon for normal listening levels (and that left you with a lot of range if you wanted to melt your speakers...)