Is preamp remote volume a deal breaker for you?

Deal breaker for sure.

I must ask ... can't they just standardize the loudness levels someday?

07-26-11: Atmasphere
The standard for balanced line is the output of the device driving the cable should be able to drive 600 ohms or less (in the case of microphones) without degradation (this calls for a fairly low output impedance BTW). If the cable is terminated at the input of the amp with a 600 ohm load, then you will hear no difference between a high end cable and a cheap one, ours, or one from Radio Shack.... If the termination is not installed, then cable differences appear.

Ralph, I'd be interested in an explanation of why the termination is necessary. Why wouldn't simply driving the balanced cable with a low impedance driver be sufficient? Obviously less current would flow through the cable if the termination is not present, but I'm not sure why that would make a difference.

On an unrelated note, congrats on your re-done website. Looks great!

Dracule -- in my case, not having a remote would not be a deal-breaker. I have one at present, but I could easily live without it, as I did for many years in the past.

Best regards,
-- Al

Hi Al, If you put a 600 ohm resistance across a cable, which has capacitive, inductive and resistive aspects, the outcome is that the 600 ohm resistance becomes the primary aspect of what you are driving. The other things (which normally affect a cable when the amp input impedance is 100K or higher) get 'swamped out'.

This is how all high fidelity recordings are possible, BTW. If you have any recordings from the 1950s, what we have is a recording that sounds better the better you make your system. (Some people think that the best recordings were made in the 1950s). How did they do this without high-end cables? How could they run microphone signals over 200 feet and have them sound anything like HiFi over such a distance? The answer is that they used a low impedance termination on the line.

For example, I have a set of Neumann U-67 microphones. They use a small tube preamp to take the signal from the condenser element. This preamp is only a single triode gain stage- so its output impedance is high. But it drives an output transformer that is set to 150 ohms at its output. So many mic inputs on mixers and tape machines have a low input impedance like this. It allows the mic to drive *stupidly long* cables without any degradation at all, and the cost of the cable is kept to a minimum.

Now maybe I'm a little odd this way, but it seems to me that a system that would allow one to ditch expensive cables in favor of even better sound would be a good thing.

Mind you- if the terminations are not there, the 'better sound' I mentioned could well be lost to cable interaction.

Thanks, Ralph. That all makes sense, as I see it. I would add, though, that the values of those cable parameters, and their effects, will decrease as length decreases. I would therefore expect that in the case of a short cable, say a few feet long, and if the cable is reasonably well designed and is driven from a low impedance balanced output, that those effects would be insignificant both with and without the termination.

Best regards,
-- Al

Here are some quality remote controlled attenuators (the ubiquitous motorized Alps pot excluded) that can be added dto an active preamp.

http://www.tentlabs.com/Products/page31/page31.html

http://www.tubewizard.com/new_remote_volume_control_is_the.htm

http://www.marchandelec.com/att.html
(this one looks like the one used by Atma-sphere MP1)

http://bentaudio.com/index2.html

http://www.partsconnexion.com/tkd_73340.html