Gain Mismatch

audiocr381ve

I brought home the Dodd Reference Preamp yesterday and so far have been very pleased with it however there is no doubt that the preamp has a ton of gain. At 9 o'clock, it's extremely loud. I've never had this kind of issue before so I'm having to really learn about gain matching (don't know if that's the correct term).

So my amps have a input impedance of 100 ohms and an input sensitivity of 0.5 Vrms. I cannot find ANY info about the Dodd RLP. I'm using a Chord Hugo DAC which has a built in preamp (32 bit digital volume control). If you hold the Crossfeed button on the Hugo while powering it on, it creates a 3v line level output.

My question is; would lowering the volume on my Hugo be a band-aid solution to fixing the gain mismatch or would it actually solve my problem?

audiocr381ve

DSkip wrote: »

Lower the volume on the chord. If it gets too high, the chord itself starts to put out a distorted signal. I usually kept it low - all you are really doing at that point is gain matching anyways.

Thanks Skip! Simple as that I guess. Love it.

[Deleted User]

Are you sure about the 100 ohms input impedance, that seems pretty low. Maybe 100k?

[Deleted User]

I looked on their site and it is 100k, much better. Actually why does the volume control position at 9:00 o'clock bother you? That's what volume controls do, adjust the relationship between output levels and input sensitivity and speaker efficiency and listening distance. Remember volume controls don't really turn anything up, they are "turner-downers". Since you have a relatively low input sensitivity full output is reached at 0.5V input and your preamp probably can produce ten times that amount, at least.
There's really no need to consider changing anything, sit back and enjoy the great signal-to-noise of plenty of input voltage. As someone once said, "it's all relative".