I reached out to the Metrum Acoustic engineering team, and they are super good at getting back and being helpful. This is taken directly from our email exchange. ........
It is perfectly normal that you still have a small amount of signal with the volume control completely counter clockwise, as this is inherent to the principle Metrum regulates volume with. We implemented it this way because it sounds better than using a regular potentiometer circuit.
If a gain mismatch between amp and DAC is present, the easiest way to temper the output signal of the Jade is by using a t-pad resistor network in the connectors of the interlink cables. Doing it this way introduces the least distortion. This modification implies that your cables become 'directional' in the sense that one end needs to go into the DAC, and the other end needs to go to the amp (and not the other way around). Please let me know if you are interested in this modification. It requires 4 resistors per channel when using XLR or 2 resistors per channel when using the RCA output. These resistors need to be soldered to the cable.
Unfortunately I am not super handy with tools and think will do more harm then good trying to add resistors to the XLR cables. But I do believe and agree the design on the volume control is superior to your run of the mill components. This is taken from one article I read about the Jade DAC. Again this is for folks that are interested in knowing. Thanks
........”The Transient Two modules connect directly to the outputs without an extra analogue stage, so volume control in the Jade is achieved by raising and lowering the reference voltage over the R2R circuit. Not by stealing bits from the stream, nor by putting a chip or a potentiometer in the analogue domain. It’s a very clever idea that I have only seen once a long, long time ago”
