Originally Posted by jcmjmp

Its not just about playing at home, and really, playing with earplugs in sucks, especially at home.

When playing live, there's a balance that must be kept between all the instruments on stage. The drums are what drives stage volume. Then, there's the vocals: You need to make sure that you don't drown out the vocalist. If you do, the band will sound like crap and he'll lose his voice before the end of the first set.

With a 2204/2203 JCM 800 Marshall, to get a bit of the Phase Inverter distortion and power tube compresion & breakup, I set set the master at approx 5. There's no way I can do that on any stage for venues of up to 600 people. That's where an attenuator helps. If you want the extra kick of setting the master volume high, you need a hotplate.

For home use, just use a pedal and forget about cranking up, or use a combination of attenuator and pedal. That's what I do.

I agree with American Viking where an attenuator on an amp like a DSL (or a jubilee) isn't really needed because of all the front end gain, much like a Mesa Boogie. Those amps weren't designed for being cranked loud to get good tone, they were designed to get good tone at low and moderate volumes.