USAudio wrote: > Sean Adams (founder of Slim Devices and designer of the SqueezeBox) > highly recommends you have a analog volume control between the > SqueezeBox and the amplifier, for various reasons.
I think you are misquoting him. Or perhaps misinterpreting what Sean wrote. The concern is to have proper gain matching between components. It is a bad idea to *need* to have the SqueezeBox do attenuation, as sometimes it might not. If your setup allows the SqueezeBox sending full volume to your amp without overdriving the amp, and that in turn does not overdrive your speakers, you are done. You do not need anything else. But if your amp may over drive your speakers if fed full volume music, or worse, full volume noise, they you need to have something to protect your amp and speakers. As you mention further on, attenuators work just fine, you do not need any "analog volume" control if your gain staging is right. This is really not a SqueezeBox issue, you never want to have the volume knob be enabled so that some J-Random friend can turn it up to 11 and blow up your speakers or amp. > Also by using the SqueezeBox to control volume, you lose some > resolution as the volume is being adjusted digitally. I don't think this is accurate either. When you turn down the volume, with anything, you reduce signal and since noise is constant, you have reduced the signal to noise ratio. It is true that if you cut the volume to 25% (down 12 dB) you take a 16 bit signal and now have only 14 bits that are meaningful. But the same impact happens in analog. -- Pat http://www.pfarrell.com/music/slimserver/slimsoftware.html _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
