One comment on Croese's dislike of digital volume controls: Accuphase and Wadia have taken steps to overcome their USUAL defects, and in my experience with an Accuphase DP-75, they have succeeded. I used my DP-75 with excellent cables and an excellent passive preamp, and still lost detail versus the DP-75 "straight into" my power amp(s). An internal stepped attenuator might be better yet, saving the cables and their connectors, but I can't hear any degradation if I keep the digital volume attenuation below 12 decibels, which in my system is always enough. Accuphase claims you can go up to 20 decibels of attenuation and I have no reason to disbelieve this, but if you can arrange to use as little as possible, that couldn't hurt.
Running a CD player directly into power amps,
good, deleterious, dangerous or simply stupid? Since I never listen to my tuner, and am too lazy to bother with vinyl anymore and never got that tape deck (thank God!), can I go the direct route? An "audio consultant" (a.k.a "salesperson") told me it was unthinkable because of some mismatch in the output of one and the input of the other... He was trying to sell me a preamp. Since, long ago and far away in a different audio galaxy, it was believed that the shortest signal route (all other factors being otherwise equal) would provide the best, least degraded signal, I thought, and still think for that matter, that my idea is swell. A better CD player + a better power amp + new earthshaking speakers and voilà! Am I missing some great truth here?