This review makes me confident I will enjoy the A07 Max I have in the mail. In any other situation the possible channel imbalance would likely bother me, but that can be fixed in my AVR if necessary. The load dependency is a bigger deal, I hope it's not an issue with my speakers.
I'm curious, how hard would it be to replace the volume pot with a better one? Is that just a simple solder job?
A simple solution to this could be a volume pot bypass switch, shouldn't add a significant cost and would please everyone.
Yes that would be a nice touch. To keeps costs down they could use of a volume pot that has a push switch incorporated into it that bypasses it. Though that may be dangerously easy to accidentally activate.
Turning the vol pot to max effectively bypasses it in any case and it would have to be a very bad pot indeed if it caused channel imbalance at max. Some channel imbalance at low volumes is almost always present in analogue volume potentiometers due to the nature of them because at low volumes the signal is passing through much more of the resistive material which itself has some degree of variation, and our ears can hear small level differences at low volumes whereas at higher volumes any channel imbalance db becomes a far smaller fraction of the total db. I
It is impossible to know if the specific unit tested happens to have pot outside acceptable margins of variation. If i got one this bad, I would return it for a different unit if I intended to use the volume control.
Yes I suppose you could solder in a new vol. pot of the same total resistance, pinout, lead spacing etc. it’s often pretty easy to damage the tiny traces when desoldering a pot however.
It’s likelly makes more sense to just adjust the level at thr digital source or preamp stage if you can (a dac with digital vol control, a full preamp, avr, dsp, computer volume etc).
If you need or want to control volume in the analog domain, You could get something like the $50 Schiit Sys, a passive preamp with a volume pot and 2 selectable inputs. Presumably the pot used is more consistent.
Or get a passive analogue pre with a better volume control type, like a resistor based attenuator, etc. those can be great assuming the resistors are precisely matched. or a relay- resistor attenuator if you want remote control and don’t mind the relays clicking when you change the level. But those are many times the price of the amp itself unless you get a generic one from the bay or aliexpress etc. . Though matching resistor values is pretty easy these days.
But seriously, assuming you have a digital source for the price of the aiyma, just set the vol ar max and control the volume in the digital domain. Or if that leaves you with too little usable range of levels in the digital (as it did for me with the a07 and the JBL studio 520s) set the aiyma at something likehalf volume and see if any channel imbalance is noticeable or measurably significant relative to your typical listening levels. That way you can strike a “balance” (sorry) between bit loss of digital attenuation and the vicissitudes of analogue volume.
