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- Verified Buyer
I've been capturing audio from my phono pre-amp with a USB audio capture device, and while that worked well, I noticed on some recordings, I had to turn the Windows USB audio mixer control way down on some recording captures that were just peaking out too high, or even flat-topping in the audio editor. So, even though my pre-amp has a wide dynamic range, it has no level control to set how much output there is. I find, for recording purposes, it made recording records a bit wild from time to time, especially high-velocity records like 45's and 78's. So I needed some more control without adding an expensive mixer, that might potentially add more coloration and noise. Furthermore, I wanted something I could adjust quickly without fussing in a computer dialogue box for. I've been making fine recordings and saving them as hi-res hi-bitrate WAV files on USB to play back in my home theater amp. This volume control gives me the additional control I need in a passive device that doesn't add color or noise to the signal path. The only thing is I needed the ends of the RCA cables to be males, not females. Whoever made this does not adhere to the industry peridigm of males are "outs" and female connections are "ins". So I had to buy a pack of male to male RCA adapters. to make this work. Anyway, problem is solved and I have much greater dynamic range on my USB capture device without overloading the input as before. At first I was concerned the higher groove velocity records might be overloading the input of my Cambridge Alva Solo pre-amp, but the waveforms I'm getting now show no evidence of that, so the Alva Solo just has a hot output, which is fine for the amp's line level in, it just wasn't so good for the USB converter device, which appears to have a sensitivity somewhere between microphone and line level (probably -30 or -40 dB). So some control is needed to bring the level down so as not to overload its input. This little unit fills the bill. By the time I would have designed the vari-pad, bought the parts, spent the time building and calibrating it, it would have cost me a lot more in parts and labor. I'm just glad someone out there makes this stuff at a super-affordable price and saves me the effort. It's clean, no hum, and is quiet. Love that it's a passive device, too. It does have tabs on the case, so it could be screwed to a cabinet to fasten it down. I just leave it float around near the laptop, it then is convenient to move it out of the way, if I need to. By the way, the input isolation appears to be designed appropriately, when turning down the control, no loading appears to be observed on the pre-amp output which is "Y'd" to the amp input and to the variable pad respectively. Kudos on that. It does the job and well!
