Top 10 low gain line stages

Hi Scott,

Good choice - I am a big fan of passives, personally. If you need a passive with remote, the best choice in my personal experience (short of spending $25k plus) is the Slagle Autoformer. My next choice would be some of the newer LDR attenuators, such as those sourced from Tortuga. Donald North Audio purportedly offers a remote controlled passive based on the Silver Rock silver transformer attentuators, which are awesome, but I have never heard the DNA implementation.

If you do not need a remote, Silver Rock is the way to go under $8k. Above that, you might consider the Da Vinci or the Ypsilon passives.

Best of luck.

I am just going to try the passive route, thanks

Let you know soon.

Krell makes preamplifiers with only 8 volts out max, I believe all of the new ones are, hope this helps.

The Lightspeed and other LDR units will work wonderfully with your high sensitivity system. I used it with your amp and it was wonderful! Look no further.

Again, I have heard your amp with this passive and am not guessing.

I was about to respond to your email, but will do it here.

ARC will lower the gain of some of their line stages (around the LS-15 and LS-16 era, I believe) from 18dB to just 12.

HI Scott,

Can you provide more context on your system (i.e., amp, speakers, ICs, etc.)? Also, do you have a price range? This would be helpful to know in terms of a recommendation.

The Lampizator should work well with a passive, if that is the direction you choose to go (subject to your cables and amp).

I had a similar issue to yours (too much gain from the source for my Doshi preamp), and tried the attenuator route, but would not recommend it - I found them colored and they reduced overall resolution of the system.

I agree with Newbee. Rothwell makes some nice ones.

Have you considerated just using in-line attenuators between your pre-amp and amp? If not, perhaps you should.