It's all bull do-do isn't it? As George said earlier, it's to make it look more "technical"; I'm sure the numbers on the faceplate bear little relation to any real output, ratios, volts, watts, or anything else.
My Creek CAS 4040 has no numbers. Ya turns the volume knob clockwise and the volume goes up. When it reaches an acceptable level ya stops turning. Too loud? Ya turns the knob the other way. Easy-peasy. We don't need no stinking numbers. ;-) cheers, frank "What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." -- Christopher Hitchens --- Original Message --- From: Mark Roberts <[email protected]> Sent: February 3, 2012 2/3/12 To: "Pentax-Discuss Mail List" <[email protected]> Subject: Re: OT question for electronics geeks steve harley wrote: >on 2012-02-03 13:35 George Sinos wrote >> This discussion is very interesting. >> >> My guess is the numbers don't really correspond to any particular >> value. The designer probably thought the fairly technical numbers >> gave the front panel a feeling of "technicality." > > >my Yamaha RX-1100 (same brand as Rick's receiver, but about 20 years older) >has >a volume knob that goes ? 60 50 40 34 and by increasingly small increments >"up" >to 0, the maximum volume; i believe the lowest number i've used is 24, which >is >about 1/3 of the way "up" from ?; i interpret these as numbers as dB >attenuation from max (expressed as such they are clear without being negative) > >so Yamaha apparently has a tradition of indicating volume in dB; They aren't really indicating volume in dB, they are, as you noted, showing the amount of *attenuation* between pre-amp and power amp in dB. Very different thing. >yet i could >see marketing dweebs in the mid-90s or later expressing concern that topping >out at zero would hurt sales and thus a concept of a 0dB reference was >substituted for attenuation from max Yep, I can see that! >or it could be that as with many newer AV receivers, there is a calibration >tool included that can listen to the system and balance it, and if possible >set >0dB to the 85dB listening reference as mentioned above; You'd have to have a separate calibration for every input source (including internal ones like the AM and FM tuners) and use a known signal. And even then it wouldn't be accurate for tapes, records or CDs because there is so much variation between recording levels. Still, being able to trim input sources would be a good idea. -- Mark Roberts - Photography & Multimedia www.robertstech.com -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
