Has anyone tried a Passive Preamp with their headphone amp?

Has anyone ever tried to place a passive preamp between their source and headphone amp?

The reasons for this would be to get finer adjustments from a stepped attenuator on the headphone amp

and also to get remote volume control.

I tried a regular preamp and decided I did not like the results, but was thinking of a Placette passive or something similar.

Thanks in advance.

I was advised to turn the volume of the headphone amp to max (!) and just use the preamp for input to it. Any thoughts? (I have a tubed headphone amp.)

That would look like this:

CD player -----> Passive Preamp -----> Headphone amp at Maximum Volume -------> Phones.

Very interesting. The NHT was something I never heard of (just their speakers). Thanks!!