Tekton Double Impacts

Lol Aric, see how much I trust you by giving you free reign on designing my gear? Little did I know I had a tube regulated power supply. Brian still hit the Motherlode with that name though! 😃

All of the discussion on gain might make me gain some insight on preamp/amp interaction. Aric's predilection for Zepplin and Pearl Jam explains his propensity for higher gain 😈🔉🔉🔉🔉 With my speakers I can't come anywhere close to 10 o'clock on the VC. 9 o'clock is quite loud on most recordings with 8:30 being where I usually listen at. I can see where have less gain I would have a wider spectrum on the VC to choose from. I'll look into a Rothwells attenuator to experiment with. 

Thankfully Aric already had a solution built into my amp......a gain control. I had forgotten about it. Just by turning the gain down has given much more volume control and range. I'm listening comfortably at 11 o'clock right now. Good deal!

Tom,
I agree with Al regarding the attenuators, Rothwell vs Harrison Labs and for the reasons he gave. They aren't expensive so you may want to get several different ratings to see which provides the desired level of reducing  db (excess gain). For example 4 db reduction may not be enough and 20 db decrease could be too much. These devices are pretty transparent and shouldn't alter the sound quality. I'd shoot for a level that allows you to listen at your typical levels with the VC near or at the 11AM to 12  noon position. 
Charles 

Since the 300B amplifier's architecture uses dual 6SN7 stages, and I omitted cathode bypass for the benefit of greater detail, the gain of the amplifier is very close to that of an integrated, however two un-bypassed stages is just shy of being able to be driven by line level (bypassing the cathodes fixes that but at the expense of some natural cathode feedback that occurs and as such, some micro-resolution is compromised- so I chose against bypassing them). Since 2 stages is just shy- and three stages is too much so to speak, the solution I chose was to incorporate an input level potentiometer on the amplifier which occurs between the preamplifier and the amp's inputs. A plug in attenuator is simply a series fixed resistance followed by a fixed shunt resistance (which is many cases loads the input excessively), the potentiometer performs the same duty except we're able to select the 100K shunt between input and ground which is an easy load for the preamp's output to drive.

On another note, I'm not sure if I'm over-staying my welcome by posting details about my gear on what is the Tekton thread, and I enjoy posting here, but if any think it's more prudent to bounce any of these conversations to an Aric Audio specific thread, feel free to post at the link below:

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/aric-audio-systems-unlimited-preamp

Best wishes, Aric

Aric,

In my opinion,  your posts here are welcome as your gear for many is a very nice match for many DI/SE owners.  I've also learned a bit from your posts--and that is always a plus.