Preamp - 18 dB Gain too low?

A lot of CJ stuff inverts polarity and since you said you were relatively new to high end audio, you might double check to see if you have the proper polarity.

My CJ preamp is inverted phase. I made a mistake but corrected. Frankly I could not tell the different between correct and incorrect phase. No volume gain or loss after correcting phase. Good call Montytx.

Thank you all. Sound like I have been worried out of nothing.

Initially I hooked up the amps with a passive preamp Lightspeed Attenuator and the volume was low, dialing around 2:00 to 4:00 to have reasonable sound. Figured that active preamp would help, swapped out to CJ and it did. The volume knob is now at 1:00 to 2:00

The amp sensitivity is 4V. Is it low or high? I have no idea what 4 Volts really mean in term of sonic amplification.

Tom6897,
I will strongly disagree with designer's statement weather he/she well regarded or not simply because zero attenuation can ONLY be achieved at volume knob turned all the way clockwise or 'up'. Other than that, preamp will always have fixed gain of certain magnitude. There are variable gain preamps, but neither of the posters I believe have those so far in this discussion. I also know that some of the units built to have a smooth gain control(there indeed you can gain a point of 0db gain) instead of volume control, but with great risk of loosing stability of the circuit.

I also disclaim to happen to be an ordinary techie for live sound and recording studios also having an incomplete Electrical Engineering from college drop-out simply because I'm more of the craft's man rather than scientific.

Nguyen 878, 4v sensitivity is quite low which I think was implied by Marakantz in his first post. A sensitivity between .5v and 1.5v is much more common and fairly high.