Does remote control degrade the sound of tube preamps?

Quality wise, there  are not that many extreme quality 'motorized volume pots' out there.

Recall the elaborate mechanism put in place by Charles & crew at Ayre, for their 'peak quality' remote control preamp.

It's not just isolation and separation of the motorization aspects from the rest of the circuitry in order to avoid any electrical or electromagnetic interference from said motorized circuitry.

it's the availability of high or peak quality remote control volume designs. They get very rare and in limited numbers, and thus very expensive, at the top of it all.

some go for relays and resistive ladders/arrays. Depending on the relays in use, this can be very very good sounding. But it can also be distinctly mediocre. Or even below the quality norm set for a $20 Alps plastic pot, the near ubiquitous blue version.

I believe that DACT makes a few remote versions of their discrete ladder designs. Which might be the most common peak quality oriented unit available right now, without going totally off the deep end.

Such a pot, depending on the applied version (customized, etc) might add $600 to an easy $1k, or more, to the final retail price of a given item.

@mapman 

Now what other impractical issues can we all worry about?

haha - well said... never underestimate the degree of audiophile ocd, er, curiosity...

@atmasphere Does this mean that MP3 does not have motorized volume control?

 "...the quality is entirely dependent on the quality of the potentiometer, not on the motor whose only job is to twist the shaft just as your hand would also do."

                                                     Plus one!

To be clear, adding remote control functionality to volume control does not degrade sound, but, if providing that feature means cost cutting on some other aspect of product, that could hurt the sound quality.  If providing remote volume control means going with an inferior potentiometer that has a motor built into it, instead of a superior manual potentiometer, that would hurt the sound.  I have a $1,000 Alps RK 50 manual potentiometer in my headphone amp.  If a builder wants a motorized version, the builder would have to engineer this and modify the potentiometer at considerable cost to so do.  That means it is "possible" to get that level of quality, but it might not be that practical.