this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2024
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if you use the volume control on your amp, you're attenuating the signal. that's assuming that the amplifier uses a pot as a voltage divider on the input rather than a gain control for the amplifier IC it uses. both are common, but if it's used as a gain control you're relying on the linearity of the pot to inform the gain of the amplifier IC and generally frequency linearity across wide gain ranges aren't fantastic which is why old stuff that used a bunch of discrete transistors instead of chips had set gain and varied the input signal level with an attenuating pot acting as a voltage divider. there are counterexamples. this is complicated.
if you don't use the volume control on the amp then there's no attenuation. the downside is that it's really loud. too loud for safety. too loud for comfort. sometimes too loud for the sustained operation of the equipment.
perfectly amplifying a signal does change its frequency response by adding noise picked up in the process of conveying that signal to and from the perfect amplifier. the noise is added because it's amplified. there's some ways to lessen the effect of this, some are effective enough to allow absolutely miniscule signals like those produced by a moving coil phono cartridge to be amplified to tremendous volumes. but there is always noise.
all this talk about amplifiers and volume control is wonderful, but have you considered the stuff that comes after the amplifier? your headphones are a great example: if you pan over to the right channel so that only the right headphone is making sound and slowly pull the headphone away from your ear you'll hear the frequency response change. the lowest notes will go away, then higher and higher pitched notes will become inaudible until all you hear are tinny high frequency sounds. that's the effect of attenuation of the sound wave propagating through the air. naturally in air, that attenuation acts as a high pass filter, reducing the volume of the lower pitched notes more than higher pitched notes.
if you pull it away in time with the beat of the music it acts like a bpm synced filter effect or a wah pedal (depending on your age).
the distance from the driver to your ear has an effect on the sound you hear. is that distance correct? everyones heads are a little different...
how about the ears themselves, are they clean? it's gross to think of, but wax acts just like a pair of earplugs.
and what about your own brain. i'm not even close to versed in psychoacoustics but just imagine agent smith from the matrix saying "you think that's music you're listening to?"
there's nothing wrong with wanting good quality equipment and for it to perform as close to perfect as possible but at some point we're picking only the most perfectly ripe, unblemished, peak season tomatoes to make salsa.
Ahhh, I think this is the part I was missing. So I should think of an amp as "injecting" a fixed amount of energy to the signal, way more than I need, and then the volume pot attenuates it back to a comfortable volume. That makes sense since we've established that pots attenuate, which necessarily destroy the signal. I still had it in my head that the amount of energy used to amplify the signal was proportional to the volume knob position.
I didn't know how air affected frequency response, but that makes sense.
As for how clean my ears are, I'm completely deaf, so who cares?
jk 😁. Thanks for the talk, I learned some things!
No problem. It’s nice to talk about this stuff. If you want the skinny on amplifiers:
There’s two parts: the volume control and the amplifier. The volume control sits in between the input and the amplifier circuit itself. The amplifier circuit can be thought of as a fixed multiplier of whatever signal goes in. If there’s x50 gain then it’ll make an input of 20 into 1000 arbitrary units(tm). An input of 2 would be made into an output if 100au and you choose between those two inputs or any number you like with the volume control, acting as an attenuator before the amplifier starts multiplying the signal.
To look a little closer, the amplifier takes a big dc voltage and modulates it based on the small input voltage. If it was a tube amplifier, all the dc voltage gets put on the plate of the tube, the input is sent to the grid (a literal grid of wire in between the plate and cathode) and electrons jump through the grid to the cathode in proportion to the grid current. If the grid current is a song, then the massive amounts of electrons gathered at the high voltage plate will jump across to the cathode in proportion to it and if an enterprising person were to put a transformer and speaker in between the cathode and their path to ground those electrons could be used to move it back and forth!
Of course, they only do that in a vacuum and when heated up, so all that takes place inside an evacuated glass tube with those parts crammed into it next to a light bulb filament to make them toasty.
Point is: you’re not even getting the same electrons!
Your solid state amplifiers are doing the same thing but with transistors instead of vacuum tubes. Feed the input into the base of the right kind of transistor and it’ll let more or less voltage move in the direction of its arrow.
You get a few of the input electrons with a transistor, but it’s mostly electrons from the big dc voltage.
Ahh ok, that makes more sense. I think I never saw the connection between a transistor and an amp until now. Using a small signal to modulate a different, larger signal. Or like a relay.