SM Pro Audio Nano Patch + Passive Volume Attenuator

First, I'll address what's wrong with it. (Five out of five stars ...and I'm talking about what's WRONG?)Just three things...Yep, its push-on plastic knob, its light-weight "mute" switch and the slightly scratch-prone nature of its front-panel finish are almost, but NOT quite, up to the expectations of "bullet proof" ruggedness that the silky and satin-like operation of its volume control and the elegance of its overall design make you expect.That's all. That is absolutely ALL I could find wrong with this little "life saver".Nit-picking? Pedantic? Overly fussy?Given that the SM Pro Audio NanoPatch has proven to be a reasonably rugged, sonically transparent and (above all) ACCURATE problem solver (for less than the price of a half-decent bottle of Scotch) ...guilty as charged Your Honour.If you're a non-technical user, that's probably all you need to know.For the rest of us, ...I'm an antipodean Audio Director with over forty years of ongoing experience, most of it live and on location. A veteran Sound Supervisor who wishes he'd had this little box in his kit from the very beginning.Why?Because conveniently attenuating "downstream" audio (in order to maintain the correct gain structure "upstream") has hitherto relied upon my collection of XL "connector-barrel-enclosed" fixed attenuators. Transparent and rugged, certainly, ...but their fixed attenuation meant carrying a weighty assortment of such metal-enclosed attenuators, (having values "stepped" in 10dB increments from -10dB to -60dB) with a pair of matched values being required for stereo.Instead of which I now use this cheap, light weight and (above all) tiny box, that allows me to instantly "dial in" matched pairs of exactly the values required.Not only that, but left to right "tracking" is maintained all the way down to -60dB and its front-panel indications, while never intended to be "lab-accurate" to a single decibel, are VERY close to the truth indeed.Balanced or unbalanced? No problem.High or low impedance? Fine, within the parameters of its intended use.It's exclusively a line level device, so the lowest it would normally encounter would be 600Ω, ...and the device undoubtedly DOES induce a tiny amount of roll-off at both ends of the frequency spectrum when it is "seeing" below about 1kΩ.Such use is rare, normally being reserved for telco lines where this tiny amount of bandwidth restriction may well help anyway.Any other "interstage" insertions invariably present over 2kΩ to this attenuator, with five to ten times that being the norm ...and I've not experienced ANY artefacts induced by the insertion of this device into such signal paths at levels nominally ranging from -20 to +4dBm.To me, that makes it the cheapest way of obtaining a "classy" calibrated stereo "volume control" for anything "downstream", be it a workstation's powered loudspeakers or an entire separate system.There's certainly nothing the least bit cheap, tiny or tinny evident in the resultant audio, ...audio that truly is "five star".

Full disclosure, I bought one of these from a distributor other than Amazon, which I won't name. I don't know if that had anything to do with it. I don't think it should as it's the same product.First the good:This seems to be the only "big-knob" volume attenuator under $100 (and possibly even under $200) that has a simple two lines in, two lines out approach, and printed numbers. The only other one I could find that came close was the TC Level Pilot, which is more expensive and doesn't have graduated dB numbers printed on it. Having to spend any more than this is a real bummer if you're just looking for a simple way to control your volume with consistent results. Everything else I found was equipped with some kind of switching, and was in a completely different price range. Oh and the Nanopatch looks great on your desk, and the mute button is very convenient.Now the bad. I hooked it up and I immediately (out of the box) had a problem with an intermittent right channel. If I touched the plugs going into the back of the Nanopatch, the signal would cut in and out. I ruled out any problems with my cables and my plugs. After wiggling stuff around and messing with it, it eventually settled out to the right channel having have the volume of the left. I returned it as defective and the distributor sent me a replacement.THIS SECOND ONE one also had issues right out of the box. It was a slightly differeThe right channel would intermittently cut in, drop to half volume, or cut out completely - but it didn't seem to have anything to do with moving things around - it would cut in if I played something very loud and then it would eventually cut out again. I checked all my cables and plugs again as I thought I was going nuts, but sure enough, I could easily prove that it was a problem in the Nanopatch (by swapping the L and R channels independently).I needed this to work very badly, I didn't want to go through sending it back again, and I am fairly good with electronics. So I decided to fix it myself. With a balanced signal, having half-signal output usually means you have lost one conductor (since the signal is sent across two conductors plus ground). I disassembled it and did some troubleshooting with a multimeter. Here is what I found:1. The right channel issues were due to a cold solder joint in the header of one of the two ribbon cable headers. I resoldered this header and the right channel was no longer intermittent.2. In fact, it was now TWICE the volume as the left channel, uncovering the fact that the left channel had been having an issue as well. Again I checked through the signal path and discovered that there was a bad trace on the board connecting pin 2 of the XLR connector. Despite there being no visible break, this trace was not actually conducting. I couldn't believe it until I bypassed it with a wire, and the left channel was the same volume as the right channel. At that point everything sounded perfect. I shook the box, moved cables, pushed/pulled the plugs, everything was totally solid.So there were two defects in this thing that were directly related to workmanship issues. The connector was a poor soldering job, and the trace can only be explained by a poor PC board manufacturing. However, BOTH of the issues managed to get through their QC. And that happened with TWO SEPARATE UNITS in my own experience. What are the chances of that? (Granted, because both of these units came from the same distributor, they were most likely manufactured back-to-back and shipped in the same batch).Now that I have the thing working, I can say that it sounds very transparent, has an accurate volume control, the mute button works well.