Hi there,

My question is mainly out of curiosity as I’m not going to upgrade my system now.

I’ve been thinking about volume control in the digital and analog part of the audio flow.

In order to prevent quantization errors it seems theoretically optimal to leave the digital volume at 100% and use an analog amp volume control.

I suspect that most usb soundcards (mine is the Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 2nd Gen) apply a digital attenuation, is that the case?

Or do we get analog volume control on higher end cards?

The quantization can theoretically be arbitrarily high as the digital volume lowers, why don’t I hear strong bit-noise when testing it? Does the card do some clever processing?

Thanks a lot in advance

  • thegarbz@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    PC based volume control is almost universally done in 32bit. Windows will convert all incoming streams to 32f before mixing and converts the final result to whatever you specify in the audio settings. Most decent audio players work the same way. Quantization errors are virtually irrelevant. Do not underestimate how much dynamic range even crappy 16bits provide, even if done poorly it would be very hard to hear quantisation noise at any volume that would make me scared that my entire hifi would blow up if a Windows bug reset the volume control too high 😅

    In some cases the digital volume control itself can be done within the DAC chips, or in receiver chips. Those are also almost universally done in 24bit or 32bit (though the latter in this case usually as integer mathematics rather than floating point).

    On the flip side there are very VERY real downsides to analogue volume control, not the least of which are channel tracking errors, variable impedance mismatches and the requirement of additional components which add distortion.

    Digital volume control is objectively the best way to do things now.