Low gain dac!

@iseland Yes, I am a native, to live here, wet and windy most of the year, but the summer is wonderful, the living standard is high, same as in Denmark to whom we belong too.
Living so isolated brings some challenges, especially when interested in Hi-Fi, by the way, have been to Stockholm once and a trip from Copenhagen to Ystad to listen to a pair of Harbeth’s 30.1 speakers that I was interested in buying, bought Graham’s instead, but that’s an other story, beautiful places both of them and very friendly people.
We have a ferry that sails all year to Denmark, Iceland and Norway, sometimes Scotland too, but I am too lazy for that, so usually take the plane, that before Corona times use to have several going’s and arrivals every day to the same countries, so 1 or 2 hours one could be in a bigger place if one so wished 😎

I tried Rothwell attenuators (after the pre), which did help with the noise but the sound lost life.

That is what an impedance mismatch will do gryphongryph OP , not dangerous but not great for sound quality either.

Cheers George

Ugh, just buy a cheap musical fidelity v90 dac and be done with it. You are not going to notice much difference, it is a quality dac that sounds as good or better than dacs costing 1k or more. I like vinyl so the MF does it for me. At most I’d spend the money on a jolida "aka" black ice glass dac...read the reviews, an excellent dac for the money and it’s tubed.

You think where the volume knob points matters. It does not.

that is wrong... just plain wrong. You can google around for the technical explanations, but it is a well known fact acknowledged by any competent designer that operating a system with a lot of attenuation is not good.