How do you add remote control to a preamp, here's how.

The benefit of a passive preamp is contingent on impedance matching. We have a situation here where the OP has an Alps pot in the passive unit, the value of which is unknown, but what we do know is that it presents an input impedance to his sources and it has an output impedance that varies based on the position of the pot. Then we have an active preamp as a follower which presents an impedance to the passive. Throw in the capacitance of the cabling and you have a pretty complex arrangement. I have seen situations where people wanted to use a passive as a remote and the Placette passive remote was one of the best to accomplish this. In those situations the passive remote was after the active preamp. The volume control of the active preamp was also set wide open, essentially taking it out of the equation. If you're going to use a combination of active and passive preamps this would be the way I would do it. However, as mentioned already, the OP should ditch the active and simplify the chain by just using the passive preamp. Assuming again that the impedancees matches up.

ozzy62, I had a passing thought of hooking up the passive preamp directly to my amp and see what happens. I'm going ahead and do that and I will report back on the results. Hopefully there will be enough gain to satisfy me. I have some doubts though considering it is a CJ solid state amp and their matching preamps have a higher gain to drive it.

Clio09 posted : " I have seen situations where people wanted to use a passive as a remote and the Placette passive remote was one of the best to accomplish this."

I could not agree more.  The Placette uses Vishay resistors with very tight tolerances to control volume and I have found it to be sonically invisible in my system.  A bit pricey but a worthwhile investment in my opinion.  Since the entire signal runs through it, it is not a place to go on the cheap !

I don't think the Schiit Saga passive can be beat for transparency...looks like they ditched the tube with the latest model.

With the relay stepped ladder volume control, you get perfect channel matching and no noise or distortion. It's as transparent as an RCA cable :-)  

The points above are well taken to get a better passive but I wanted to try this route to make sure this will basically work for me and with the excellent recommendations above I'm going to look into a better passive. But I will need at least three inputs and of course a remote.