Often the power amplifier stage of a communications device is located some distance from the control panel. The typical solution is to mount the volume control on the front panel and run a pair of shielded cables back to the power amplifier stage. A better solution is to use the Xicor X9314 logarithmic taper digitally controlled potentiometer. This completely eliminates the need for shielded cables since the digital pot can be located on the printed circuit board near the low level input stages of the power amplifier.The up/down volume switches can be located yards away as these are merely low speed TTL signals.