Hi i8on,

I've been experimenting with that very thing. I'm coming out of my cd player to the ZDSD either with coax or analogue, bypassing the preamp, going direct into my power amps, controlling the volume with the remote. What engaging sound! Maybe the best that I've had so far. And that was great, but then I made the mistake of bypassing the preamp, and going direct to my power amps using the SD playback. Do not do this! That requires you to turn the internal monitoring off, which appears to deactivate the control over the output level from the menu. I didn't blow my drivers out (or my ears), but it was not a pleasant experience, or one that I would care to repeat. I'm perfectly willing to admit that my understanding of the way the ZDSD works internally is incomplete, so if anyone knows a different way to control the volume of the SD card playback internally, I'd love to know it. As far as I can tell, SD card playback levels need to be controlled externally - by that I mean with a separate preamp. I'm afraid that I was traumatized by my experience, so I haven't performed that little experiment yet, but I will once I recover. Hope this helps. Anyone else played around with this yet?

Thanks,
Randy