Attenuator recommendations

It occurs to me that all you need is resistors in male/female adaptors. How's your soldering? You might start with 3 KOhm and see if that works. To give you an idea of the rating, P=V^2/R, so 1 watt would be more than enough. If you can find Vishay at 1% tolerance, you're cookin'. You can't get more direct than that without cutting into the IC's.

RCA requires only one resistor on the positive (inner). XLR needs two. If I'm remembering correctly, (it's been a while) terminals 2 and 3 are hot while 1 is ground.

Why don`t you try passive preamp? TVC is the most recent design and it seems that most owners prefer it at any prize.

You dont need an active preamp, you are not using a Turntable so no need for phono or diferent sources switching, just CD direct to amps has enough gain. Sell your active preamp and go passive EVS like Tvad said use a low impedance of 1k will probably match better with your Pass amps with low input impedance. You can also try Placette RVC email or call Guy at Placette and ask about it, Both have 30 day money refund if you dont like it...they have smoked the best preamps out there given the right installation!

I've used the EVS, Endler, and Rothwell attenuators. I preferred the EVS which have just come back into production. They allowed for fine tuning where as the Rothwell are a finite 10db attenuation.

Thanks for the clarification.

This is not the case with my current preamp but I have now auditioned two different (tube) preamps which both had this same extreme volume issue.

You can't just randomly insert componenets in your system, no matter how fine they may be in other systems, and expect them to work in yours. Any change you make has to be with the entire system in mind.

Those other 2 preamps are simply not compatible with your current system unless they have provisions for lowering their gain. I don't see the sense of introducing a preamp that has more gain than your system needs and then trying to compensate with attenuators. If you are set on the rest of your components then you just need to audition preamps that have the proper amount of gain for your "system."