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[QUOTE=&quot;Don_M, post: 20101, member: 3184&quot;]That's what I took away from his chart, too -- dynamic range doesn't necessarily have an inverse relationship to gain, so this capability must be due to something else in pre-amp design. What that might be, I can't say: I only roomed with an EE in college, I didn't major in it!Unless you were thinking out loud here, I see little advantage to having a switch for selectable gain if it wouldn't also mean greater dynamic range. The only benefit I can imagine is that a switch might bail the buyer out in situations where a higher setting causes amp or tuner overload, but the lower setting doesn't. That's a pretty narrow circumstance that can be avoided through careful pre-amp selection.I read a post not so long ago from a knowledgeable source asserting that a) most people who think they need an amp need a better antenna instead and b) of the few who do need a pre-amp, almost none of them need look any further than the high-input Winegard HDP-269, because its 12 dB gain was all just about any household within roughly 50 miles of the transmitters and with fewer than five TVs really needed. (He wasn't a Winegard shill, AFAIK.)A CM 7777 makes sense in the deep fringe because its noise figure is 1 dB lower than that of the HDP-269. It's not really due to the high gain at all. That lonely little dB becomes crucial in weak-signal areas that are close to the noise floor in the first place.[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE="Don_M, post: 20101, member: 3184"]That's what I took away from his chart, too -- dynamic range doesn't necessarily have an inverse relationship to gain, so this capability must be due to something else in pre-amp design. What that might be, I can't say: I only roomed with an EE in college, I didn't major in it! Unless you were thinking out loud here, I see little advantage to having a switch for selectable gain if it wouldn't also mean greater dynamic range. The only benefit I can imagine is that a switch might bail the buyer out in situations where a higher setting causes amp or tuner overload, but the lower setting doesn't. That's a pretty narrow circumstance that can be avoided through careful pre-amp selection. I read a post not so long ago from a knowledgeable source asserting that a) most people who think they need an amp need a better antenna instead and b) of the few who do need a pre-amp, almost none of them need look any further than the high-input Winegard HDP-269, because its 12 dB gain was all just about any household within roughly 50 miles of the transmitters and with fewer than five TVs really needed. (He wasn't a Winegard shill, AFAIK.) A CM 7777 makes sense in the deep fringe because its noise figure is 1 dB lower than that of the HDP-269. It's not really due to the high gain at all. That lonely little dB becomes crucial in weak-signal areas that are close to the noise floor in the first place.[/QUOTE]

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