Sdcampbell notes that most volume controls don't seem to do much for the last 1/2 turn or so. I too have noticed this. I think that the reason is that pots are being made with "linear" taper and with "log" taper, but the "audio" taper that we used to use seems to be unavailable. Sometimes, back in the old days when audiophiles built their equipment, if we couldn't find an audio taper pot we would use a log taper, but we always considered this to be a less-than-satisfactory substitution. In these days of multikilobuck preamps you'd think they could get this right.