Super-sensitive volume controls - remedy?

Thanks for all your input. After posting, I did some searches for the attenuators and found that this issue comes up fairly often.

I am using the MM input for the DL-160 and can't imagine what the Shure would be like. As for speaker sensitivity, it obviously has played a part in this, however my concerns with the Rotel preamp occurred back when I was using Magnepans, and, as I recall, was just as bad, if not worse.

I may, as Jafox has suggested, call Parasound and see if they have a soulution, and if I find a pair of attenuators that aren't too awfully expensive, I may give that a shot.

I think I just need to do a little more homework before making my purchases from now on!

11-23-14: Jafox
I tried these several years ago and they literally destroyed the 3D performance and less so, the dynamics. Horrible horrible horrible solution to reduce the gain.

John, I know that you are a particularly experienced and knowledgeable audiophile, and I always consider your comments to be among the most reliable to be found here, but nevertheless I must ask: Did you physically insert the attenuators into the input jacks of a component, or into the output jacks of a component? If the latter, as I indicated in my earlier post it would easily explain the poor results you obtained. At least, that is, if they were the Rothwells; I'm not familiar with the designs of the others that have been mentioned.

Best regards,
-- Al

Found a helpful review of the Rothwells at "Enjoy The Music" August 2003. See link below. A few less exclamation marks than in Jafox's post but, otherwise, seemingly consistent with his observations. I see them carried by Amazon so might b possible to try and return them if they didn't work out. I think I'll pass for now.

http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/equipment/0803/rothwell.htm

One of the bigger problems faced by preamplifier manufacturers is that when Sony and Phillips got together and created the Redbook specification, they really had no clue as to what they were up to.

As a result, they set the digital audio output spec at 4 volts! Why do I say they had no clue?? Because its obvious they never looked at amplifier specs, to find out that no amplifier ever made has needed 4 volts for full output.

There was also an assumption that no-one would ever want to listen to tape, tuner, phono or any other source other than digital. The result is that you have to knock the digital source signal down in order to use it. Passive can kinda sorta work in this regard but have problems, attenuators can kinda sorta work but have problems and active preamps can kinda sorta work but have problems.

If you want to get to the bottom of this, complain to whomever made your digital source! They need to set the output to something a little more reasonable- 2 volts would help and 1 volt (which was the old analog standard) would be great.

We've been building our volume controls in our preamps so that the first few steps are fairly close together to help get around this problem. We can also build our preamps so that the line section has no gain but still buffers the volume control and can still control the interconnect cable to eliminate cable artifacts. But this too is an imperfect solution. In a world where you have some amps with anywhere from 15 to 50 db of gain and speakers that are anywhere from 84 db to 104 db, there are going to be problems!!

Now, much more so than back the 1970s or 1980s, equipment matching is a serious issue.

I understand what you're getting at, Atmasphere, but even back in the 70's and 80's I don't recall using any source that required turning the volume pot up much past 12:00 on any amp I ever owned. Of course, I have forgotten a lot of things about those days! Maybe direct from a tape head?

I may be missing some important electronic principle or oversimplifying things, but it seems that the maximum gain of a preamp could be lowered while using more of the volume pot to accommodate a wider range of output voltages from the various sources.