You can try it, your not necessarily loosing any thing with digital volume, and what your trading off is the better DAC output vs the impact of the digital volume.
It’s actually sometimes better to reduce volume digitally just to get to a sweet spot on an analog pot.
I wouldn’t personally use digital volume on a 16 bit signal feeding into a 16 bit Input on a DAC, if I could “upsample” to 24 bits or higher (same sample rate) at the same time though it might be worth it.
I used a passive pre between the Amber and the amp at one point to allow higher gain, though it wasn’t strictly there for that.
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Here is what lampi has to say on the matter if you’re curious.
I personally think it sounds better in hi gain as well, but unfortunately it’s a little too hot on my headphone amps for me to use without a preamp of some sort… I refuse to use digital volume lol
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Thanks guys. I think im going to to make this simple for myself and just keep using low gain. When I’m in a certain critical listening mood I may set it to high gain and fine tune the volume by hand. I figure the gain switch does a better job than an external passive would do to reduce signal.
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Minus the new Horizon dac, my addition of the Baltic 3 basically rounds us out well in this thread now.
I came home early today hoping the delivery would come midday as promised but instead i had to wait, thus i spent the afternoon listening closely to my last set-up.
Innuos Zenith > SOTM >USB regen > Exogal Comet+ dac > Vinnie Rossi L2iSE > Klipschhorns. I have enjoyed this particular set-up for a long while now.
I have a playlist set-up of songs i know well and use to test my speakers, this helps me with my room adjustments, speaker positioning and understanding my equipment better.
The Baltic 3 exhibits more precise and crisper instrument separation which in turn contributes to a nicer overall image, soundstage and cleaner “picture” of what’s going on in my soundstage over my Exogal Comet+ in this set-up. This was easy to tell within the first dozen songs i played tonight. The Exogal presents a wide soundstage with rock solid imaging, and has nice separation in the soundstage but the Baltic 3 feels immediately crisper, w/ increased detail using the stock tubes on this single particular set-up.
I’m going to put many more hours on this set-up, eventually swap amps and even swap tubes in the dac, there is a $1k NOS tube swap sitting aside, waiting their turn to be plugged in. Purchased on the advice of others more experienced with the sound characteristics of this DAC, yet i was still told to take my time and enjoy the stock tubes which were selected for their voicing by the good folks at Lampi and do seem to sound damned fine this far.
At this point I’m pleased and trying to ween myself off the constant desire to upgrade stuff. Everything makes a difference in 2 channel and the more money you spend across the board the better things get. Happy listening to you all, I’m gonna kick back and get lost in some soft music tonight.
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It upsets and bothers me that i can’t give the kind of breakdown of what I am hearing in the detailed language we have of word descriptors for audiophiles🥺 I keep reading the thread you guys have put together of detailed words and their meanings but most of that gets lost on me no matter how hard i try to concentrate while listening.
Sometimes i’ll take notes and focus on specific parts or pieces of the music and I manage to put together a sentence or 2 and i feel very proud of myself, but most of the time i simply revert to this weird thing that happens to me of just “seeing” the stupid music in some kind of weird ghostly image and any sense of wording just goes out the window while i mesmerize myself that way.
As you guys get better and better at hearing the music over the past several months i have somehow gotten worse at it, which has caused me to pause on the words i put forth in writing. Currently the internet is “forever”, and damned if i want everything i put down in writing to be stupid or non-sensical commentary for the ages showing the world just how stupid or worse incompetent I was after i am long passed and gone.
My brain/mind does this crazy thing which allows me to actually sit back and watch a ghostly rendering of the music as it is played, I just can’t focus enough to listen to the details when that is going on, I’m too busy following the movements of the music as it flows at me🤯 !
I desperately want to give a head-to-head comparison of the Amber3 vs the Baltic3 and i honestly am having trouble doing that. My A3 made a high pitched noise that came directly from the box itself from day one since i had received it. I also happen to listen to VERY low volume, like under 60db and many times under 50db. It’s really not uncommon for me to listen to an entire album in the 45db region. I have worked hard at making sure my rooms are quiet, very quiet when i sit down for a prolonged session, I sit there and actually turn DOWN the volume level as i get deeper and deeper into my listening session until i find myself immersed in this virtual show of ghostly shapes flowing through my speakers and lulling my mind into a very calm and relaxed state which eventually puts me to sleep. That high pitched whine never allowed me to relax, I could always hear it especially as I lowered the volume more and more throughput my session, it would actually get louder and more pronounced which agitated me and always caused me to shut things down never really reaching my state of zen like relaxation….
It was a really good DAC but it had to go since it made noise and i did not think enough to simply pull all the tubes and swap them out to see if that would have stopped the noise. ( i am 95% sure now the culprit was a noisy tube) 
. All this means is that I never actually formed a proper opinion of what the dac was doing because I could never really get my ghostly flow of sound going strong w/ it.
When i put together a group of components, silence, dead silence is key to me. No hum, no whine, no outside noise at my seat, if i hear noise of any kind when the volume is at ZERO, i start pulling parts, cables, etc. until i isolate the noise and then i swap. That’s it. The A3 was noisy and thus it had to go.
My Pendant amp constantly teeters on the point of being thrown out a window, because it is so tube, set-up and location sensitive. It either plays noise free or annoys me so much it gets pulled from the stack till i feel like making a whole new set-up for it again and starting from scratch. The only reason i keep it is because when the stars align and it is noise free it’s an exhilarating experience all over again to listen through.
Anyway, the point of this very long winded post is that even though I desperately want to compare the A3 to the B3 i don’t feel comfortable trying to do it right. My A3 played and provided sonic bliss until the volume got low enough where that stupid whine would kick in and piss me off to no end, and then it didn’t. Same exact reason my living room is getting a new overhead fan. The old fan works great until i can hear it, thus it’s gotta go! I can’t have fan noise when i’m trying to listen down at 45 db’s, it’s ruining the experience. Thus, what can i say about the fan, it’s a great fan until it’s not 
(anyone need a great used fan for their living room, it’s big and really moves some air)…
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Being able to describe what you like is important. Being able to hear and know what you like is more important still. Not being able to describe that experience to others is not something you need to be too concerned about.
Enjoy the Baltic and enjoy the rest of your listening weekend!
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Last update on my New Baltic 3. For some reason there is no High Low gain switch. I emailed Lampizator to ask if it is now hidden or internal but I don’t have a switch for my DAC. This is a problem for me I need the damn switch because of the variety of ways I planned on using the DAC. I do not understand if the new models for some reason the choice was taken off but now I’m pissed and really annoyed. The switch allowed for much better control of my very low power set-ups which I can’t do like I wanted to now. This may be the fastest flip of a new device ever in my possession. I want the damned switch 
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Wait really there’s no switch? It should be on the back under where the selector to change digital input is. I’m almost positive the baltic I heard had it there
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You see a switch? I don’t see a damned switch. Fucking Rob @ Lampi North never mentioned that as an option or anything other than standard and Lampi Poland shows it as standard. Where’s my fucking switch? What’s the catch I don’t get? Did he make an improvement in the DAC the lasts few months and forget to tell us all about it?
There’s nothing under the box, on the sides or in the back like it’s supposed to be. I bought the damned thing new so I would have no issues and I’m now working myself into a frenzy over a stupid switch.
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Huh yeah that’s really weird, surely something like that wouldn’t be an option right? Cause that would be really stupid if it suddenly became an option, and there’s no real reason to take it away? I wonder if they just made the xlr outs hot and the rca lower gain instead but that also wouldn’t make much sense? I really don’t know, that’s just strange it’s not there at all
On the lampizator site, it’s clearly there too, I don’t know what would change to have that go away
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I knew there was a problem this morning, I had my volume down at 5 and it was still louder than I wanted and the low volume control I’m used to was off. I went to flip the switch to low gain and bam, I was like WTF?
It’s not necessary but it allows me to gain more control at very low volume and also helps attenuate noise on very high sensitivity set ups. Again, it’s not necessary but was really useful to me
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???
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Yeah, No idea what happened? The only custom option I asked for was a BNC plug on the S/PDIF because i like how BNC locks and an upgraded EML Rectifier to be added? That’s it…Like I mentioned, I now have emails out to both the distributor and Lampi asking for an explanation. I’m trying to chill, it’s really not a big deal, but now i WANT to know what output voltage he set the unit at.
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Here is the answer I just got back from Rob at Lampi North America. My question to him back was what output voltage are we at now? 2,4, or 6 volt.
Hi Nick,
That’s how they are built now.
The switch is a sound quality compromise because it uses resistors to drop down in output. If the output is lowered, the sound gets neutered. (so to speak)
Best,
Rob
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So I can see that, but they should really note that, and offer to give you the option to choose the fixed voltage. Without a doubt imo the dac does sound better in high gain, and I can see how omitting that would improve sound quality, but I think offering that as an option should still be a thing. I guess their answer would likely just be to buy one with a volume control option which would be better, if it didn’t add so much extra to the price
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Rob from Lampi North will come back with an answer as to the current voltage output setting.
This was a dramatic change, it is obviously something someone just came up with recently. I can’t say that I’m pleased, there were very specific instances I wanted to be able vary the gain.
It’s not a deal breaker but it sucked the joy out of the whole experience real bad.
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If you make it a point you’d be able to send it back and get it installed I’m sure, but that’s a suck ballz customer experience for sure. It’s not something you show on your site and then simply take away without explanation.
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No, i’m not sending the unit back to Poland, Even my own use for the low gain switch was to attenuate the amp volume in a handful of situations and that was simply due to listening volume preferences. As long as his voltage output is somewhere between 4 Vpp and 6 Vpp which i am absolutely sure they optimized before making the change nobody will have an issue or say anything.
Now that the initial surprise and annoyance is receding, i’ll focus on taking my time to listen for differences as the tubes slowly bloom and the electronics settle down/in over the next few weeks.
I bet they deleted the switch off all new units coming out.
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Hopefully you can get something sorted, the easiest solution right now would be to get a good quality passive preamp to lower the level coming out of it, (but ideally an active preamp would be more ideal if it was a really nice one), but you will take a bit of a quality hit there, but it would be the most flexible solution
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Dang all this low gain talk has got me thinking I should see if there are weaker tubes options for my amp. Maybe that’ll allow me to use high gain on the Amber…
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