[Matt Ion]

almond wrote:

really where you see the pre-out voltage at work is in the amps gains.
say you have a deck at 2v you would set the gain maybe 2/3 of they way
up (with a dmm of course) and with and 8v deck (like my eclipse) you
would have to turn the gain up say 1/3 of the way. this keeps your amp
from working as hard.

Well, this'll drive Nick crazy, but it's nitpick time again:

The output voltage of your deck in this instance make no difference whatsoever
to "how hard the amp works". Your deck is pushing out higher voltage, and your
gain control is dialing it back down. In the end, it makes no difference to the
amp.

For easy calculation, let's assume your deck puts out 2V and you run the gain at
full. The preamp section of the amp is getting up to a full 2V (fluctuating
with the signal, of course). Now you use a deck that outputs 6V. In order to
get the same output level, you have to turn the gain down to 1/3 (this is also
assuming a linear input, for the sake of easy calculation). So now you're back
down to a 2V signal coming out of the gain controls.

i've used decks with 8v preouts all the way down
to a 1 volt preout and can tell you there is a huge difference in the
gain setting and sq. just my 2 cents and really noone even needs to
listen to that but there it is.

There's going to be a difference in the gain controls, for sure, but differences
in sound quality are more likely due to many other factors besides just output
voltage. Any deck that outputs 8V is NOT going to be a "cheap" deck, to begin
with, and will inherently sound better than some electronics-superstore brand
deck with 1V output.