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

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...)

I know one thing for my listening...having more, and cleaner WPC, almost always seems to articulate the music better over all the volume spectrum...that's if, of course, you have half-way good speakers, preamp, and other stuff,etc. I have 600 WPC. Do I need it? Probably not, however my music sounds articulated and clean at all levels, especially at low, soft levels. Your system's volume control is pretty much relative to your system. At 10 or 12 my music would be sort of loud for the room and my tastes. Loudness and articulation are definately two different animals i.e., nothing is louder and more obnoxious than a fully turned up boom box...it's plenty loud but no articulation.

Sure this is the sweet spot, but I find that some of today's digital gear puts out so many volts, that I end up with my analog preamp's volume at the low end of the scale.

I pretty much solved that problem by only playing LP's in my main system, but the new the new PS Audio DAC coming out in the next months claims to have a digital volume that does not degrade at any value above 50%. I am thinking this will be ideal to allow our analog volume to be optimized, and adjust the digital to get everything into it's sweet spot, for any given desired SPL from the speakers.

Just the opposite for TVC's, where output impedance rises with less attenuation. S&B TX102 @ 1KHz: .14/-40dB, 14/-20dB, 1.4K/unity. That's why I use high gain (38dB) amps with them. Input impedance is more favourable with attenuation too.

I have CD's that are "loud" at 1:00 and others at 10:00, depending on the recording level.