Right now I have both the Play Control and Wave sliders all the way up and everything I'm not using muted. Should I just leave these turned up for the best audio quality? I'm using an x-fi in "game mode" running winamp w/ in_mad at about 50% volume level.

Yes you should leave it turned right up. You should not touch the bass and treble controls, though.

Why?

Set it to 11

edit:

In all seriousness though, my understanding is that you should leave the master volume to 80%ish to avoid clipping, and the others can be set to 100% since they are digital. I could be totally out to lunch though, and I don't know how Vista differs (except that it does).

When using analog signals (at least given with D/A-converters (DAC)) it's favored to have strongest-possible signals (not overdriven), otherwise the signal-noise (background noise) could become hearable and distracting. A too high signal can lead to overdrive, clipping, distortion etc, so below full scale should be a good setting, guess so (signal-processing?, implementation? etc.) Have a look at SNR, signal noise etc. at wikipedia (e.g.).

So, you saying that one should set master volume (analog) as high as possible without overdriven. and adjust volume using digital instead (like volume control in media player) Am i correct?

Well I'm using XP so I guess that doesnt matter but what sort of program can I use to see if I am sending a clipped signal to my speakers? Also, what about my winamp volume? That is digital I assume so max?

Interestingly there seems to be no program around with which I can set the volumes to a specific value (0-255 or whatever the width is), every program that accesses Window's volume control has those stupid inaccurate sliders!

If you use WaveOut then Winamp simply adjusts the system-wide Wave volume, the same you see on Windows mixer. Using DirectSound you control another (digital) volume multiplier below the global Wave volume.

With fixed samplerate soundcards setting digital sliders to max will introduce additional clipping, if the data is resampled and is already at maximum level or clipped. Use UDIAL to examine if clipping is introduced. Read the warning on that page.

As for analogue sources – Line In, CD Audio, Aux/Video/Telephony In (analogous to CD audio) – actual zero Unity level differs from card to card.


A few once popular audio codecs (DACs) can be directly controlled using AC97Mixer by Alex Miina. With this program you can set the volume of all DAC inputs (PCM, CD audio, other inputs analogous to CD), even if they're not exposed to Windows. The interface can't be customized though, so some values are adjustable only as hexadecimal numbers.

No, I talked about the signal, not your amplifying. It's the other way round. Don't make more science of it as neccessary, for home listening you should'nt take too much care: my amplifier-volume is set to a certain-value and the sound-signal is controlled via foobar or if neccessary via the windows-mixer (using volumouse for fast volume-changes (phone, bell etc.)).
With mixing you have your mixer, input signal is set to a high-but-below-overdrive-value.

How could setting it to 100% cause clipping? Even if you have a player that is causing clipping (like VLC with the 200% volume bug) setting it to below 100% will not reduce clipping.

You shouldn't touch the bass and treble controls because turning those up will cause clipping. You should only do equalisation in the analogue domain really.

Actually I know that this is possible with AutoIt scripts

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According to the cats at Benchmark (of DAC 1 fame), the 'correct' thing to do is run [all] software volume control at '10' and do your attenuation with a physical volume control (preamp of some sort apparently).

Check out the speech here:

http://extra.benchmarkmedia.com/wiki/index...dio_performance

Andrew D.
cdnav.com

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[quote name='Borbus' date='Nov 22 2007, 18:39' post='531364']
[quote name='Jebus' post='526364' date='Oct 29 2007, 15:04']
How could setting it to 100% cause clipping? [/quote]
It shouldn't, but some lousy cards simply can't handle it.
Years ago I hookup up a scope to soundcard output, to see clipping on Soundblaster16 and even worse FM801.
On those cards, you just shouldn't set both master and WaveOut to max...

tone controls will bring about the apocalypse

i agree with digital's suggestion to read Benchmark's "mini-paper" on the subject. and I agree that all digital volumes should be run at 100% until the point where it's deciding what an analog level should be.

lastly, no offense... but if you're concerned about quality the first thing you should do is turn your x-fi into a door-stop. (come on, it's mostly just a joke a dn a jab @ creative) but yeah, i guess it depends on what you're doing with it. unfortunately there's no PCI cards that I know of that have all of the acceleration for gaming sound APIs and multiple digital outputs for surround (and you would need multiple converters, or something with enough AES or SPDIF inputs to handle the required channels).

but still, using DTS output on SPDIF from the X-Fi into a higher quality decoder and converter would still sound better than coming right off the X-Fi outputs - and you would still benefit from all of the accelerations with nearly zero latency. most "receivers" for home theater, even the cheapies, have input for DTS/AC3 on SPDIF.