Hi and thanks for your help. I have built a bottlehead kit to learn to solder and am going over circuits trying to teach myself. I thought a good first project would be a switch or passive preamp, which I need in any case. I nave a DAC that sounds good being fed directly into the power amp (It has a digital volume control). I also have a phono setup that is fed into a phono pre, but needs volume control or potentially a buffer before going to the power amp. The whole system is balanced. I am thinking of building a switch with stepped attenuator on one of the paths. Is there a good choice for switches designed to be wired as balanced switches, and should I use a pot, transformers or a stepped attenuator? Also if I go ahead and put attenuation on both circuit paths, just for versatility later, will one of these methods be more transparent when the attenuator is set to full volume? Thanks a lot for your help. I wonder if there is a plan, kit, or something like that.