Placette RVC vs. Placette Active?

I compared the placette active to the placette passive (not the RVC) in a setup that did require a somewhat long interconnect to the amplifiers, so the passive was not in an ideal setup. Under these conditions, the active sounded more lively and "vivid." Even the active does not actually have gain (it has a unity gain buffer), but that is usually enough gain for most applications these days.

I think the Placette active is a really nice sounding linestage for the money. My only issue with it has to do with functional concerns. While I like the small steps between volume settings (which is what Placette offers with something like 128 steps), the first step up from off can, in certain systems be too loud, necessitating the use of some other in-line attenuation. Also, I would have preferred having a balance control.

Thanks Larry! By the way, I also owned those Stax Omega phones I see in your system. (I later switched to dynamics and good headphone amps as technology progressed).
I was actually considering either using the Placette on its own or adding it between my (tubed) preamp and amp and seeing which setup sounds better.

If you do not need buffering to match source, ICs, to amp, I would expect the RVC to be a better choice, but many systems do need some buffering, especially if you run long ICs, and in that setting the Active would be preferable - so nothing inherent to either independent of system context . I agree that a balance control would have been nice (I owned both) - I good alternative would be the BENT Tap-X (which I also owned), which also has the benefit of volume control and does address impedance matching in a way the RVC can't, and much cheaper than the active. In a proper system, I would choose the Lightspeed Attenuator over any of them (though it does lack balance control).