Interesting point. What about the case where you have your digital volume set to 1%? Would this not squeeze the samples into 1/100 the dynamic range? If I set my volume to 1% it seems to me like those samples now have to all exist within the bottom 1% of the 16b range. Do you not lose at least 5-6 bits of precision on your signal doing this?
teawrecks
joined 1 year ago
It's not that "hot liquids hold more things" afaik, it's that hot liquids have more energy to break apart the larger particles into smaller ones, i.e. dissolve them. Otherwise you'd expect the dissolved sugar to settle at the bottom when you cool the tea back down.
Microsoft is as ubiquitous as it is specifically because of decades long efforts to be the default in government offices around the world. So the Indian government using Linux definitely counts as a win.
Yes, if everything aligns perfectly, there is no impact. The bit shift would be when you set the volume to exactly half, but that's probably not going to be the case. The app volume control alters the signal slightly, multiplied by the OS altering it slightly, which has a virtual certainty of introducing a floating point rounding error on every single sample, so now the ratios between your samples is ever so slightly different. And for what reason? What did that operation gain you?
And no you're not going to hear a difference, but the point of being an audiophile is less about hearing a difference, and more about good quality preservation practices.
The goal is to send the exact, unmolested digital samples from the file out to the DAC, which then sends its analog signal to the amp where you worry about how much to amplify that signal for listening.
When you set everything to 100% volume in software, you can assume that there is no software doing anything to alter the digital signal before sending it to the DAC (scales each sample by 1.0). But when you're under 100% volume in software, it assumes you don't have any analog control over the volume, so it needs to step in and alter the digital signal so that it shows up quieter to the DAC (ex. scaling each sample by 0.25). Depending on how that's implemented, it can result in losing resolution and thus quality of the signal.
I think this mattered more on older software that's more likely to use a smaller bit depth, but bugs happen, so why risk it and spend those extra cycles on a process that can only result in a worse signal, right?
Any sufficiently high quality audio stream from my Plex or Tidal, always set to max volume in app/OS settings -> Topping D30 -> JDS Atom -> Sennheiser HD6XX.
Good enough for me.
That's not the comparison at hand, we're talking YouTube audio compression vs any actual music track.
Seems like they should already have a pulseaudio version working by now. Or I guess someone told electron that pipewire was going to replace pa, so they held off on any support whatsoever?
I don't think matrix supports game streaming. revolt voice chat didn't even work for me, which made sense because it had a big "warning, this is deprecated, a replacement is being worked on". Don't know if they finished it. Never heard of guilded.
Framework laptops have it as a BIOS setting. I keep mine at 60%, and before a trip I bump it back to 100%.
I'm sorry you have to type so much, I am familiar with most of it, but I appreciate your effort to make sure we're on the same page without being a douche about it lol. It sounds like we're saying similar things, but I don't understand why lower precision is different from losing information. To me, that's the same thing, it's a lossy operation.
So the thing is, I have a pair of desktop speakers without any physical volume control that I primarily use for convenience. And for whatever reason, a comfortable listening volume with them is between 1-8% in the OS volume control. I guess the internal amp is just hardwired to be way too loud?
Anyway, I assume that this setup is resulting in objectively lower quality output than if I were to have a 100% signal going to a decent quality DAC/amp with analog volume outputting to the same speakers. And not in a "technically" kind of way, but in a very real "we just crushed the signal into 1/25th of its original scale" way. Would you agree? Am I mistaken?