[Audio18]

Hi guys. I have a question regarding volume control. I use the Swans speaker system along with foobar. Since the volume dial on the Swans are out of reach, I've always been using the hotkeys on my keyboard to change the volume of the M-Audio card. The problem is, it isn't very fine tuning, so it was hard to get the sound just right. I also didn't like it because the master volume of the card changed constantly. Anyways, I just tried a different approach. My already-enabled Volume Control DSP was already enabled in foobar (to prevent clipping), so I decided to see if I can assign my hotkeys to just work with foobar's volume control, and just leave the M-Audio card's volume at a constant 75%. It worked great! The volume control is much much finer, and I can find the perfect volume. Does anyone see anything bad in doing this? Is the volume control on the M-Audio card worse/better than foobar's? Thanks!

 

[stefan]

Good question: I asked a similar question on the J River Media Center a while back and got the following info:

- If you reduce signal level you will lose something because you'll be using less of your DAC's output range. If you output 16bit and your source material has peaks that come very close to 100% of the DAC's output range, and if you reduce the signal level by 6 dB, the peaks come down to 50% of the DAC's full scale. In effect, you're now listening to music on a 15 bit DAC instead of the original 16 bits. You lose one bit of resolution for every 6 dB of signal reduction.
- So information is being lost if you are reducing software volume, but this is by all accounts inaudible beyond an extreme level.
- You can avoid this by software upsampling (the elusive "secret rabbit code" is reputed to be the best).
- how this is affected by DAC upsampling I have NO idea.

I personally use replay gain and bring volume levels down by about 5db -- this gives me more volume knob range at normal listening levels and I can't hear a difference.
Anyone else have any ideas?