Quote:
I'm, pretty sure you are wrong about 100%, chicolom. Sound volume set to max is important when sending analog signal, say from a PC headphone plug or MP3 player to an amp.
FiiO E10 is a DAC (Digital Audio Converter) and an amplifier in one piece. Computer sends a DIGITAL signal (zeros and ones) to the DAC where it gets converted into analog and amplified then. Sound volume setting on a computer does not affect sound quality.
It's OK to set any sound volume on the computer. The higher it is set, the less you will need to turn the knob to go from quiet to unbearably loud. So it's more about the preference of how much you want volume to change by turning the knob.
Thanks, I'm aware how DACS work.
That what's I used to think as well ^. But apparently digital volume control does have an impact on a digital signal.
Technically as soon as you affect the volume of the original song through digital volume control, you no longer have bit-perfect playback. I volume of 90% multiplies the original signal by .9, and 25% would multiply it by .25. Replay gain is the same, it multiplies the signal by a factor either <1 or >1.
A quote from http://thewelltemperedcomputer.com/Intro/SQ/VolumeControl.htm :
"One easy example is applying volume control. If you change the volume to 90% for example, the software will multiply all the digital audio data by 0.9. The result is rarely an exactly 16-bit word, just like dividing regular numbers often results in non-integer numbers. It usually has a remainder...which will require more bits (digits, or decimal places in regular numbers). If the data path is limited to 16-bit, the remainders will be truncated. That's analogous to dividing 10 by 3, and having a result of 3. With extra digits available, a more accurate result of 3.333... can be achieved."
So the digital signal
does get changed.
I recommend reading through some of that website ^, its got a lot of information about computer audio that head-fiers would probably be interested in. I learned a lot by browsing through it.
Kevin, the CTO of
High Resolution Technologies himself sent me this in an email regarding their HeadStreamer DAC:
"[size=x-small]The one feature very worthy of noting is that the attenuator is under complete host (computer) control but is a purely analog device. This approach avoids the
resolution robbing downside of a computer digital attenuator and simultaneously avoids the poor tracking of a potentiometer (knob) based volume control. Effective, this is the best of both approaches and avoids all the downsides.[/size]
In case anyone is still reading/interested, some other things that kill bit perfect playback are resampling of the signal to a shared bit depth/sample rate. This is why people use ASIO and WASAPI in media players, because it bypasses the windows audio mixer.
If you send a signal to the windows audio engine, it will convert it to a 32 bit float bit depth and also convert it to a common shared sample rate. This is because sound cards (DACs included) can only run at one sample rate at at time, so if you want to multiple sounds from the OS and different applications simultaneously, the need to all be converted to the same sample rate.
So for bit perfect playback, you need to
not digitally attenuate the signal,
not convert it to a 32 bit float, and
not perform sample rate conversion.
WASAPI exclusive is useful in bypassing the latter two (bit/sample rate conversion). When enabled in a music player, the music stream takes priority over other computer sounds (aka, they
don't sound). This is because it matches the bit depth and sample rate to music files native properties (the computer sounds don't fit into that sample rate, so they don't sound). Instead of using a common shared stream, it uses an exclusive stream for the music file.
Now, I don't know how much loss in resolution these conversions actually cause.
It's quite easy to setup your sytem to avoid them though, so why not do it?
[ I will say that I do use replay gain when playing my music on random. If i decide to listen through several tracks on the same album, I click it off. Replay gain also likes to amp piano music a little too much making it clip occasionally :\ ]
