Preamp has too much gain

You need a source that puts out less voltage, or a pre with more attenuation, or an amp that has less gain, or speakers that are less efficient, or some combination of these.
Herman (System | Reviews | Threads | Answers)

Bingo.

Very easy to fix, just need couple of high-quality resistor to construct a voltage divider.

Assuming your preamp has an input impedance of 100kOhm, then, to reduce the gain to 1/3, you can insert a 200kOhm resistor in series to the input RCA.

The gain will be reduced by 100k / (200k + 100k) = 0.33x, i.e. 1/3 in this example.

You can also use a high quality variable resistor, such as a Bournes pot then you can adjust the gain with a screw driver.

What Extremephono suggests is precisely what Lamm Industries did to attenuate the gain in my LL2 Deluxe. $80. For a non-Diy'er, it was money well spent...and less expensive than variable inline attenuators. It's also easily reversible.

However, I needed to know the input gain of my amp for Lamm to know how to adjust the preamp.

Wow, answers to a question I didn't even know I had. I have the same pre as Electra and always wondered why I could only turn it up to about the nine oclock position, (with zero being about 7 oclock), without it being too loud for your average listening session. My source is a Sim Audio Moon Eclipes, my amp is a Redgum, forget the model but it's about 150wps, speakers are Osborn Grand Monument Refs. Am I going to get a better/ different sound by doing some of the changes you have recomended, or does it really matter where the dial is set?

One of the few things that designers will agree upon is that the closer you operate to maximum volume then the better the sound. Volume controls always take away. The ideal system would have an overall gain (source + preamp + power amp + speaker efficiency) that plays a particular recording at the ideal volume level with the volume control all the way up.

I’m not talking about loud volume, but the maximum that a system will allow. The problem is that the level from recordings varies widely and we want to listen to different types of music at different volumes, so the maximum volume is often too loud.

If you consistently have the volume control way closer to the minimum than the maximum then the volume control is choking some of the life out of your system.