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In Reply to: RE: Volume vs Gain posted by davidandcandy@gmail.com on August 11, 2015 at 13:26:21:
Gain is usually a term applied to amplifiers. Gain limits the current such that the amp doesn't have its full potential available. Many stand-alone amps don't have gain controls, which means the full power is always available based on the feed it gets. With a gain control you can dial back the amount of output on the amp. Why would you even want to limit it? I'll come to that.
Volume controls how much of the potential output from your sources you want to let pass through through to your amp.
Think about the amount of available water pressure you have in your home. If you have alot that is akin to a powerful amp. If you use a very small diameter hose to wash the car you have cut the "gain" of your water flow.
Whatever the maximum flow might be given your water pressure and hose diameter, turning the spigot is akin to adjusting the "volume". Volume controls are limiters. When turned fully up, no limit and you'll get the maximum available.
It is often useful to have both volume and gain controls. This is more the case when you have a powerful amp or very sensitive speakers. Let's use the case of sensitive speakers. Turning the volume just even a little bit might yeild a big difference in volume such that using a volume control with a remote might be difficult to make tiny volume adjustments. By reducing the gain you can "swing" the volume control more and achieve the same volume adjustments.
Many preamps are said to give their best sound when the preamp is allowed to use a fair amount of it's own gain. This requires the volume control on the preamp to be in its mid range or higher. That might provide too much overall gain to the amp and be too loud. If the amp has a gain control you can dial back the amp's gain so that the preamp can operate in it's sweet spot and you will have the ability to use a fair amount of swing with the volume control. It takes some experimentation to discover the best combination of these settings.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Volume vs Gain - jsm71 05:35:13 08/12/15 (2)
- RE: Volume vs Gain - mcondo 05:42:35 08/14/15 (0)
- RE: Volume vs Gain - Tre' 13:11:44 08/12/15 (0)
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