I have Equator powered monitors that I am using with my Stanton turntable and a Rega preamp. The monitors are too loud with the input from the preamp so I would like to attenuate the signal going to the monitors. Should I attenuate the signal going into the preamp or into the monitor. I'm going to use a step attenuator that should be pretty clean. The cartridge signal is 4.6mV at 1kHz which would make the preamp output signal 460 mV. My inclination is to attenuate after the preamp so as to only amplify the attenuator noise once in the monitor.
I wouldn't add attenuation before the pre-amp, where the signal level is very low (4.6mV from your cartridge). Even if the attenuators don't add noise, you'd be forcing the the pre-amp to amplify an even-lower signal level which would accentuate any noise introduced by the pre-amp.
