2. amps-preamps
  3. 1088878852

No Volume Swing -- help

I go from no sound to ear bleeding when I turn the dial from 0 to the 1 hour mark on my Pre-Amp! What am I doing wrong?? I can live with it, but I prefer a little more swing in the volume control.

This happens with both my Rotel RMB 1095 and my Parasound HCA-855a amps. My pre amp is an Audio Refinement Pre5. Which is nothing but an analog preamp. CD player is a Marantz DV8400.

I can somewhat remedy the situation by bringing the gain controls on the back of the Parasound from 100% to about 25%, which gives me a little more volume swing. But I've heard all that does is introduce resistance and attentuation, which is actually bad for the signal path. I do not even have this option on my Rotel 1095.

What does all this mean. Is my YBA Pre5 junk? Do I need to internally modify the gain on it to be flat? How do I do that?

Any help is much appreciated, as I am finding this quite frustrating!!

Thanks,

Jason
jfiluk
swampwalker's avatar
swampwalker
5,138 posts
 
Both Rich and Raquel are correct. High gain pre-amp may require attenuating the gain on the amp. The fixed attenuators like the Rothwell, which I have used, do not have any significant impact on sound quality.
jfiluk OP
8 posts
 
Swampwalker,

Ok, so it sounds like I have 2 options to attenuate the gain on the amp:

1) Use the gain controls right on the amp
2) Buy the Rothwell attenuators and keep the amp volume gains at full.

As it is now, I dont notice any difference in quality with the gain set only to 35% on the Parasound, but this Rothwell idea sounds interesting.

Thanks for the advice.

Jason
racarlson
68 posts
 
Jason -- There are potential advantages to using the attenuators: finer adjustment in the resulting range of your volume control, and (perhaps) better channel tracking - even some very good volume controls don't track as well at lower levels. Of course, if you're happy with the sound now, why bother?
Rich
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