THETA GEN 5A OUTPUT GAIN CHANGE MOD

Leave the Theta alone, kick the cat out, get a Reference Line Premminance 2 passive preamp, enjoy the improved and effortless musicality then use the extra couple of thousand dollars elsewhere in your system and take your main squeeze out for a nice date, preferably dinner and a concert with unamplified music.

I agree wholeheartedly with 1953 but would maybe substitute a Placette remote volume control for the Ref. Line.

I have a gen va with the 24/96 mod. My experiences have been that no active preamp sounds better compared to a passive pre setup correctly, short cable runs and such. When comparing active preamps, they added their own sense of dynamics and harmonics. These never seemed to improve on the dynamics and hormonics of the gen. va. They would also often remove info and degrade the soundstage. I now have installed 40pt stepped attunuators inside cary 805c with the gen va. going straight in the input. This has allowed the Gen. va to show what it can do. The soundstage is big, the harmonics are great, and the detail is all there without being hyper. I wonder if this is due to the lack of another gainstage that is not needed in my situation. The cary only needs 1 volt for full output. I have had the same experiences with the gen. in other systems. A melos sha-gold with both an active and passive output sounded better in passive where the attenuator was between 11 and 1. It seems that spending all the money for the gen. one should utilize it. To pad down the gain and then add another gain stage sounds like a crime. melos, audio research or any other did not improve the sound of a dirty old noble volume pot in a passive device with my gen v,let alone a good attenuator device. Those are two dog on Roger Waters amused to death and if I knew dogs better, I could tell you their breeds. Redkiwi, I also seem to find between 11 and 1 to give best sound when using active devices and now you have told me why, thanks! 1953, effortless does decribe a gen. v with a passive device. The music just flows effortlessly.

Rrlibv, I agree. I reckon that people have got the wrong components in their system if they feel the insertion of a preamp improves it. The biggest problem is usually inability of a DAC to drive a power amp, but you do not have such a problem with components like the Theta. Your solution of putting a passive attenuator in the amp is a viable solution to get the best resolution and natural harmonic textures, but will risk some compromise in dynamics. This is because the output impedence from your attenuator will be higher than is ideal to drive the amp's input stage. What saves this from being a serious problem is that the output of the attenuator will be driving very short cables. But it all depends on the amp. Some amps sound best with some padding down at their inputs (my tube monoblocks being a case in point - it has two inputs, one of which is padded down, and the reduction in distortion is significant in the context of my system - this being due to the vanishingly low output impedence of the previous stage and the relatively high input impedence of my amps). Presumably this is what you are finding too.