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Is the digital way of controlling volume with the volumite controller on the B32S hurting sound quality in any way? (losing bits or anything)
I suppose not.. |
HTPC>cMP/Cplay>>juli@>Buffalo32S>AMP4>Focal1037BE |
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Any form of attenuation, analog or digital will reduce dynamic range. You are far less likely to notice the loss from the Buff32S than you would from say a 10K pot. The standard pot will have much more negative effect than the shifting down of bits. Especially when you are working with 32bits and more.
Cheers!
Russ
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Russ, bringing this one up again, this time on the BI, 24bit. I feel that I'm missing a lot of information and especially dynamics from vol.pot. position 7 o'clock (fully attenuated) up until 'round 3 o'clock. From 3 to full blow, there's still tremendous difference - forcing me to leave the volumite at 100% juice and attenuating at analog side. 2 questions: How is the digital attenuation curve (in bits) compared to vol.pot. position ? And can I expect better quality on the BII edit: Ups - forgot to say, I'm plying 16 bit redbook. Edited by user Thursday, June 3, 2010 2:40:44 PM(UTC)
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I am sorry I am not sure how to help you "feel" those bits. :) If you used some other means to attenuate you would likely have the same sort of feeling. All forms of attenuation do damage to the signal in one way or another. :) I really am not sure exactly how much division is involved. The max attenuation is -63.5db. From there I will leave the math to you. The last question about Buf II is simple. Numerically it is better. The layout is better. Most everything is better. :) Edited by user Thursday, June 3, 2010 4:08:37 PM(UTC)
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Yes I know that the BII is a better product. My question was pointed to the volume control only - whether 32bit vs. 24bit results in a better resoluted volume control or not.
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Sure, it will go from excellent to superb. :)
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For my own clarification let's say for a second the Buffalo II (or an actual oversampling DAC) oversampled everything to a 24 bit signal and you used a volumite on it. If your source material was 16bit would the digital attenuation be better than on a non-oversampling DAC using the same 16bit source material? Or does it really only depend on the actual source material?
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The internal sample is always exactly the same regardless of the source material.
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So since the Buffalo is 32bit it would have better digital attenuation than a DAC that was only 24bit regardless of the source material? Thanks for the help. Edited by user Sunday, December 5, 2010 5:20:04 PM(UTC)
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Russ White wrote:The internal sample is always exactly the same regardless of the source material. So the signal that is attenuated would be the 32bit internal sample? If that's true does that mean using the digital volume control of a 32bit dac should be technically superior to a 16 or 24 bit dac?
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Yes. Because the data is still fed into the DAC at full scale. You really cannot do better with an analog attenuator for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is channel matching. :) But noise and distortion also come into play.
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