[Rinoue]

Right now I have my Foobar2000 Volume at 100%, Dac volume at around 40% and the active speaker volume at like 20%,  is this the wrong way to approach this? what should be maxed out and what shouldn't?

 

[Krackatus]

Use your ears man, thats always a good way to go.
 
I know that if I crank my amp up really high I get hiss. So to avoid this I always have the amp at lowest volume and digital players/windows settings maxed out. I will still use the media player volume for convenience, but generally you want the loudest possible output before it even reaches your amp/speakers. 
 
However some amps don't start sounding good until the volumes up. So my advice is if you want to play the music loud, the active speaker volume should be the last thing to adjust, everything else maxed.
 
On the other hand if you want to play music really quiet, you might benefit from turning either foobar or your DAC down so that you can turn your speakers up loud enough to get some heat running through them so they can sound their best. Hope this helps mate.

 

[Rinoue]

hey, makes sense, I never realized amps might sound better at a certain volume so i will play around with that a bit, thanks!

 

[NiHaoMike]

In general, you want the digital gain to be set to unity (100% on most systems, but there are exceptions - use alsamixer which will report actual dB values) and the volume set as late in the signal path as possible. In some cases, you might need to turn it down somewhat earlier to prevent clipping later on. Some buggy DACs will misbehave with very large signals (rare), in which case you'll have to lower the digital gain a little bit.
 
And then there are tube amps where the volume setting before the amp affects the sound. In that case, you adjust it until you like the sound.