castleofargh
Sound Science Forum Moderator
- Joined
- Jul 2, 2011
- Posts
- 10,534
- Likes
- 6,183
The impedance output seems to remain low on all settings, so I doubt there is a lot going on with the switch beside basic voltage gain. And if I'm correct on that guess, then the rule of thumb should be to use a low setting and switch up if your headphone doesn't get loud enough. That's it. Several engineers, including 2 who designed the amp I was asking about, suggested going with that by default.Trying to switch low/hi gain on my Magni 3+ with 6XX and can't catch any difference. What exactly should I feel?
I wish to bring to your attention that most people have never tested the sound change from gain switch properly, meaning the higher gain is always louder, rising faster when we turn the knob, so they can very well mistake low gain vs high gain with the "louder is better" feeling.
What @baskingshark described for low gain, matches well with how people would describe loud VS quieter. Probably pure coincidence ^_^.
Beside the rule of thumbs that I tend to follow because why not, I'm fairly convinced in practice that most of the time it doesn't matter for sound. Some settings will just be a PITA when turning the volume knob.
Amps where the gain is for input gain, amps where the high gain has very high impedance, or where the lower gain is a special last minute fix for sensitive IEMs because the amp sounded like garbage at the default setting(hiss like hell or distorts) into very low impedance, could require more considerations or cause extra sound differences. But I don't think your amp fits any of those scenarios.