Life without a remote

Unless you can place the preamp where it can be adjusted from your listening position, you will ultimately become dissatisfied since you are already accustomed to a remote.

My secondary system and my back-up preamp do not have remote control and I can live without it for the short term. I listen to my main system around 2-3 hours per day and enjoy the ability to make volume adjustments. When I use the back-up preamp, I find it distracting to get up to make minor volume adjustments. When I purchased the preamp, the lack of remote wasn't a deal breaker since I liked the sound and build quality for the dollars.

Given the choice between a stepped remote volume control and a continuous non remote volume control, I would choose to forego the remote. I hate stepped volume controls. I always find one step too loud and the next too soft.

Good luck on your quest.

You need to start drinking wine,time it so that when you need to adjust the volume your glass also needs topping up.Works for me.

Bent Audio has a stepped attenuator remote so you can add remote volume capabilities. I have two preamps with his attenuator remotes. Problem solved. Check it out
http://www.bentaudio.com/index2.html

Thanks for all your responses. As in many cases here on audiogon there are many pro and con opinions and it is difficult to discern to which side to lean. I guess if you believe that the sonic improvement outweighs the get off the couch cost it is worth it. A tough call indeed.

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.