The sound quality is everything. Not much effort to get up from your chair to adjust volume manually. Often you know the setting on the vol control for each recording, so you could just keep the vol control set and merely turn the power amp on/off. If you remember that a particular recording is mastered at a high vol, you could take the precaution of turning the vol down for that one, but many recordings are mastered at comparable levels, so that is not needed.