Remote Control (Passive) Preamp

I second the recommendation for Tortuga. Best solution out there to add a volume and some tube varnish. 

I love my Luminous Audio, which uses a Khozmo, and I do not hear it. Might be too much for your budget.

To close the loop, I ended up with a Khozmo stepped attenuator preamp with remote control. It is very well-built! Even the remote. I’ve noticed nice gear can sometimes have cheesy remotes. Not so with the Khozmo. 

I did struggle for awhile to figure out how best to connect everything. I was not a fan of only the passive pre between my source and amplifier, probably due to an impedance mismatch. In fact, the Khozmo sat on the shelf for awhile and was replaced with a $50 pot preamp. How did this thing get such good reviews, I wondered, while a good chunk of my money sat on the sidelines collecting dust? That is until I placed my tube buffer between the Khozmo and my amplifier. This must have fixed the impedance issue I was having because holy cow does it sound nice! Highly recommended as long as you know how to account for all the impedances in your chain. And that’s not a problem with the Khozmo - it’s a challenge with any passive preamp. At the end of the day, I am happy to have the Khozmo in my line up. Very transparent. I don’t even want to use metaphors or descriptions to describe the sound because it just gets out of the way and lets the music flow through, which is exactly what you want a passive preamp to do. 

@mkgus, which tube buffer are you using?

I took a cheapo FX Audio tube buffer and added a low-noise DC power supply, replaced the low-quality pot with a voltage divider using Amtrans AMRG carbon film resistors, and swapped the tubes for a matched pair of GE JAN 5654W tubes. It’s definitely nothing to brag about and it’s the weakest link in my system, but it adds enough tubey-goodness that I really enjoy it! In the future, I would like to replace it with a higher quality unit. If you have any suggestions, I’m all ears.