I would suspect that an external remote volume control would not perform as well either.
You would be taking an output from the same place on the switching bus as the tape outputs connect to, then routing it to the back panel and out the back of the PAT-5 chassis, and then into an external box.
Then it would go into the volume pot, and finally back out of the external box and into the PAT-5 chassis and to the line board.
You would wind up giving up some of the functionality of the PAT-5 since you'd probably have to re-purpose some of the RCA jacks on the back panel. You would almost certainly increase the noise floor and possibly decrease the channel separation. In addition, you might get some rolloff in the treble region from the increased capacitance of the wire after the volume pot.
For the external box itself, you would need a power supply for the remote receiver and to drive the motor on the pot. I suppose you could take the power from the preamp chassis, at the expense of yet more back panel real estate and some connectors and cable. (This assumes the power supply in a stock Insight PAT-5 is up to the task. If not, you're probably back to an extra supply in the external box.)
Then you'd have to buy the external box. Metalwork isn't cheap.
Next you'd have to fill the hole on the front panel of the PAT-5. That's going to be more or less ugly. I guess you could have a custom front panel made up. That won't be cheap either.
Finally, you'd have a one-off preamp that would be hard to sell if you ever need to get rid of it.
Did I leave anything out?
