Does remote control degrade the sound of tube preamps?

After owning 3 preamps without remote and now having a remote preamp, I would never change.  

I own an Atma-Sphere MP-3 preamp, which I purchased used without remote. I used it for a bit with the manual stepped attenuator, but ultimately couldn't live without the convenience so I sent it back to Ralph to have the remote installed. If the sound quality decreased I can't detect it, and it's still the best preamp I've ever owned and a great match for my Atma-Sphere M-60 mono blocks.

My experience is every recording has a sweet spot for volume, and the only way to find that sweet spot is to be able to adjust volume from your listening chair. I believe a remote is a better answer overall than long interconnects or speaker cables that might enable you to have the preamp next to your chair.

$600 to $1,000 for the Volume Control? Good Grief! No wonder the reviewers take the time to talk about them. I thought the cost was $50 to $100 before we start talking about ‘knob feel.’

Yes, $600 to $1,000 IS a lot to spend on a volume control component.  But, it is one of the most important piece in the signal chain and can seriously degrade the signal and/or cause channel imbalances if the left and right channels do not track perfectly.  Spending for quality here makes far more sense than spending it on other stuff, like fuses, and fancy power supply caps.  

The only time I see remote control affect sound quality is when manufactures use those crappy integrated circuit volume controls, like the ones used in Audio Research, or early Sonic Frontiers, to name a couple.

 What's the point of building a beautiful tube circuit only to have it ruined by a 10 cent IC.

Cost to have remote control can get quite expensive. A motorized stepped attenuator can get up to $1000 for small lot production.

Cost in my preamps with an motorized Alps control is about $250.00, but a motorized Khozmo can be much more, and they take up a lot of room. Then there are the relay types. Relays aren't cheap, and there are a lot of extra parts involved.

 None of these types will affect the sound quality in a negative fashion.