Life without a remote

To me, the proper listening level is critical. The most satisfying sound can be a surprisingly small band, so tiny increments of change are helpful. It would take a lot of getting up and down, with a lot of uncertainty because it would be hard to make an A-B comparison. Remote control of volume is VERY helpful. Balance control by remote is also useful.

Properly implemented, there is no reason remote control necessarily degrades sound. There is some cost involved in implementing remote control, so, to the extent it means diverting part of the budget, in that sense, it can degrade the quality of a particular component; I personally don't understand why cost-is-no-object designs would not include remote control.

RhIjazz raises a good point about some stepped attenuators (whether remotely controlled or not). I agree that ones with too few steps are not useful because the ideal volume almost always lies between steps. Those with 2 db steps are particularly annoying (one of my objections to transformer passives which necessarily are limited in the number of available steps).

But stepped attenuators, like those in BAT, Boulder, Levinson, VTL, etc. linestages, have enough finely graded steps to avoid these concerns. Some of these have steps that seem unnecessarily small (my Levinson No. 32 has .1 db steps), but, the small steps are more important for setting channel balance than volume. I have found that a .2 db change in channel balance is clearly audible, though a 1 db step in volume when playing music, is hard to hear. That is probably the reason for having such small increments in the better units with stepped volume controls.