Computer Audio Asylum

Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

Use this form to submit comments directly to the Asylum moderators for this forum. We're particularly interested in truly outstanding posts that might be added to our FAQs.
You may also use this form to provide feedback or to call attention to messages that may be in violation of our content rules.

You must login to use this feature.

Inmate Login

By default, logging in will set a session cookie that disappears when you close your browser. Clicking on the 'Remember my Moniker & Password' below will cause a permanent 'Login Cookie' to be set.

Moniker/Username: The Name that you picked or by default, your email. Forgot Moniker?	Examples "Rapper", "Bob W", "joe@aol.com".
Password:	Forgot Password?
	Remember my Moniker & Password ( What's this?)

If you don't have an Asylum Account, you can create one by clicking Here.

Our privacy policy can be reviewed by clicking Here.

Inmate Comments

From:
Your Email:
Subject:

Message Comments

Original Message

RE: Let the grenade throwing begin...

Posted by Tony Lauck on February 6, 2009 at 13:51:51:
If I were you, I would use a digital volume control in your player software. Then taking care to keep your volume control down (and all O/S noises have to have been thoroughly exorcised) see how much digital attenuation you customarily use. Find a setting for which 99% of the time you never need to go louder. That will be the attenuation you should use for your analog gain. Then make up a resistor network for each channel, consisting of a voltage divider and place it right at the line level input of each active speaker.

If you never listen to anything but your computer then you don't need the switching capabilities of a preamp, nor the phono capabilities. No preamp, no matter how good, is going to beat a passive voltage divider in sound quality, if that divider is placed right at the amplifier input. You will lose a small amount of resolution from your DAC if you customarily use much digital attenuation, but I'll bet it is considerably less than you will lose going through a preamp.

I have an amp with its own volume control, which I have set once and never change. It is set so that reference level pink noise (-20dbfs RMS) out each speaker is at 83 db at my seating position. (86 db when both speakers are playing) This is sufficient to play all genres of music and corresponds to the level at which most records were monitored when they were being mastered. For critical listening when the neighbors are away I keep my digital gain at 0 and listen at these levels. For quiet listening I turn down the volume with the software gain control in the player.

Tony Lauck

"Diversity is the law of nature; no two entities in this universe are uniform." - P.R. Sarkar