Wayne Parham Messages: 18751 Registered: January 2001
Illuminati (33rd Degree)
Thanks for those suggestions. I might just pull the trigger on one of those decks.
And like you, I've become a fan of passive attenuators instead of preamps. I designed one a few years back for some of my amp builder friends, mostly a way to provide a remote control for them. See the link below for details. But after building a couple of prototypes, I fell in love with the passive setup and never went back.
Mine is a resistive attenuator rather than an autoformer, and there are differences, to be sure. But I think the main thing is minimizing the number of gain stages. I'm running a single-ended tube amp, and with a good source, it's just about as simple a circuit as one can get.