Quote Originally Posted by Richard View Post
You can try-ee and if no like-ee it costs yer nowt.

Your thinking is basically right, but an L pad is just two resistors, in this case one is variable. Otherwise the input stage would have to be buggered around with. Lower resistance / increase capacitance reset the gain around the first stage - too much agg, and you can't mess some things without altering the balance elsewhere. The amp is designed to look at a passive pot or switched attenuator, so just think of your active pre or processor as a source. I have a couple of customers with both cinema processors as source and another one with a valve pre (Croft I think) he insists on using and they all seem happy. In the case of a home cinema system there is even an advantage as it give another way the balance the channels if the room is squif. In an active system it is another way to balance the drivers instead of messing with the crossovers.
Adenda and time for a rant

We are all trapped into marketing think. It is the plague of this industry. Manufacturers do it to magazines and retailers, retailers and magazines pass it to the poor Joe public, and ego based Joe public passes it to the sheep on forums (the latest version of the disease). AND what is marketing think, well it boils down to three things 1 telling lies 2 embellishing the truth 3 diminishing competitors truths. It is a disease of the western world so I cannot cure it, but at least I can point a finger at the moon and try not to be part of it.

Buzz words - active - passive - digital - analogue - valve - solid state - horn - etc etc etc. People make money from you by misusing and misrepresenting *things*. They are of no bloody importance ultimately!! There is only one thing that is important and that is *your* music and how you want to hear it, as long as it is realised that you will grow up (change) as time goes on. So pedantic absolutes spouted one year come back to bite yer bum and make you look stupid the next, unless you have the control over your ego enough to back out of the cul-de sac you stuck yourself up.

This place and *more* so on other forums, they are being dominated by marketing men, ego based amatuers and the proffessionals, either paying for the privelege at other forums or encouraged here. Is this wrong, no not at all, as long as you have the intellegence to see through it. What I think is important is that we get some balance by getting some *real* tech-ies to talk to you. But they are very few and far between on forums and are mostly one man bands who haven't yet fallen into the marketing trap. As far as the bigger companies are concerned in most cases the guys that know what is what are banned to talk to you as they will just show up the marketing bullshit for what it is.

Rant over.