headsounds
100+ Head-Fier
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- Sep 10, 2012
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The volume knob is a problem for me as well. Is there something I can do to change the potentiometer?
The volume knob is a problem for me as well. Is there something I can do to change the potentiometer?
One of the most useful reviews I've seen on this site; A great model to follow.
I think this is an important issue. It would be nice if the Magni's volume pot ramped up less aggressively. Irregardless, this combo is such a great value they're hard to resist!
You probably already know but just in case you don't, the Schiit return policy is 15 days.
I'd like to see someone do a blind test like this with Magni/Modi and O2/ODAC
The volume knob is a problem for me as well. Is there something I can do to change the potentiometer?
As Defiant00 mentioned in his original post, you could use the computer volume control to do minor adjustments. I usually set my computer volume to around 90 then adjust the amp's volume to a comfortable level. Then you can to minor up/down adjustments from there with the computer's master volume (digital attentuation).
Alternately, you can set the computer volume fairly low so you have a large usable range. At around 25% on the computer I found that the Magni's volume control seems nicely accurate.
As stated before though, whether this degrades the audio quality is dependent on how you're getting the sound to the amp. For 16 bit music (aka, everything I listen to, CD rips and mp3s) into a 24 bit dac that leaves you with 8 extra bits to digitally attenuate the signal before you lose any data (in theory 25% should be 2 bits, so yeah, digital volume control away)
For 16 bit music (aka, everything I listen to, CD rips and mp3s) into a 24 bit dac that leaves you with 8 extra bits to digitally attenuate the signal before you lose any data (in theory 25% should be 2 bits, so yeah, digital volume control away)
Very nice write-up and that Blind A/B testing was quite convincing/shocking. So tempted to get the M&M now...
And by the way, that's a very nice Go board in the pics. Just out of curiosity, is it for aesthetics or do you play as well?
im sure this belongs to sound science but if i want to line out, the digital volume on transport has to be maxed out to not lose data? is that what you are saying?
Is that what it is with the windows system volume control, 25% is 2 bits? I wasn't sure. I remember there being long discussions on the Squeezebox forums on the subject and what range would have impact on resolution.
I do play Go, just not recently unfortunately. My main playing partner now lives a couple hours away and I haven't gotten back into the online scene yet.
For integer values, yes, 25% (aka, dividing by 4) should result in using 2 of the extra bits. For more details see below.
Disclaimer, I'm a CS major but I'm not specifically familiar with the bit format used for USB audio. With that said, if you have 16 bit music and are sending it to a 16 bit DAC then any digital attenuation will actually lose data. With 16 bit data sent to a 24 bit DAC you have 8 extra bits (data in bold, extra bits red):
So for example:
1110111010101111 Original 16 bit sample
111011101010111100000000 24 bit representation (all samples just grow 8 zeroes at the end, same data, more bits)
Since each bit is a zero or one, to get half value you would effectively move each bit to the right once. So in the case of 25% you would do this twice. Here's how the same sample would look at 1/4 volume:
0011101110101011 16 bit, all the numbers moved to the right twice and zeroes replace the leftmost bits
001110111010101111000000 24 bit, in this case instead of throwing away the last two 1s they just moved into those extra 8 bits, so we don't lose those small details (and you've still got 6 extra bits for further volume adjustment if you need it)
This is all assuming USB audio sends the data as an integer, but if it's done as a float then it's a similar principal, just not exactly the same. If it is an integer then these 8 extra bits of padding means you can adjust your volume down to 1/256 and not lose data (256 = 8 bits = 2 ^ 8).
Anyways, ultimately the exact range you can adjust before losing sound quality is dependent on what your source is and how exactly it does the digital attenuation, but in general unless you go dropping the volume into the single percents you will likely not be causing any SQ loss. And just from listening, even at 5% I wasn't able to hear any difference with the Modi in 24 bit mode.
wait but why is that if you are not lining out, you are free to mess with the digital volume without having to worry about losing data? as we all know, there has to be a dac and an amp to give sound for digital audio. so for not lining out, you are using a device's internal dac and amp. for lining out to another amp, you simply skip the internal amp and use an external amp, so how and why is that different from not lining out? or are you saying it doesnt matter if you lineout or not, its a matter of the dac, if its 16 bit audio going into 16 bit dac, you must max out volume to not lose any data, regardless of what amp you are using?