cd player with volume control - under 500

The old B&K amplifiers had a rather low impedance (22?) Ohms not an ideal candidate. I tried the same thing with an old B&K ST140, while it made sounds, I quickly discarded this approach. From there to a passive pre-amp which was better (the volume control on the CD player was very crude). How ever, I ended up with an active line stage. Of course better amps followed too.

Consider a Yamaha CDC-655.(5-Disc) It has variable output controlled by either front panel or remote. Very nice sounding CD Player. IMO sounds nicer than the Denon DCM-460
which I've also owned at a time (for a very short period of
time.) Another possibility would be Adcom GCD-600/700.

I use a Yamaha as a backup player and it sounds good especially with quality interconnects. Feed it only 4 disks though. It seems to eat the 5th. One can tailor the digital curve for diff music types as required.

Quite a few of the Kenwoods had this a few years ago. not the best players, but if you are looking for usability more than sound quality, you might want to look into them. The big sell for me was the 5 disc