Hello, I just joined, primarily for the audiophile products. Looking at purchasing the NHT C3 speakers for our new living room. Space is about 15 feet wide by 33 long and they will fire long ways. Space is just for general listening, music room with all equipment is downstairs, so hoping they will fill it with sound nicely. Cheers.
Mar 18, 2024
So it sounds like you're saying I should keep the volume on the ZuperDac down from full?
See, the way digital volume control works is that it reduces the volume prior to it being made an analog signal. As you turn the volume down, you're lowering the actual bits - you're taking the loudest sounds and making them softer. You're truncating bits and you end up using only 12 or 14bits of the total 16 you had before). If you're doing this with a 16 bit signal, you quickly reduce your volume to the point where it's growing too close to the noise floor. That is to say, the noise floor does not decrease with the volume - it remains stationary.
So if you have a sound that is moderately soft and you turn the volume down, you might lower that soft sound to the point that it is indistinguishable from noise. You mitigate this by taking a 16 bit signal, upsampling it to 24bit and doing the volume control with 24bit depth (or taking a 24bit signal and upsampling to 32bit to do volume control.) Even so though, ESS (who makes the DAC and Amp chips in the ZuperDAC and are well known) are quick to point out that a good analog volume control will be better than a digital volume control.
The OTHER problem is of course clipping of the analog source. If you have a loud sound, it might require a higher voltage than the analog section can output. Aka, if a cymbal clash requires 4Vpp, but your amp can only manage 3Vpp, you'll get clipping - the amp will be maxed out.
tl;dr: as long as the volume control is done at a high even bit depth, it won't matter. Otherwise, volume should be pegged at full (this is how the dragonfly amps work. If you're using it as a DAC and not an amp, you set the volume to 100%). From looking up info on the ESS chip Zorloo is using, it appears that the volume control is done after upsampling to 32bit, mitigating any of the truncation concerns. This being the case, you should probably just set the volume to 50% and leave it there. Doing this will prevent you from lowering the softest sounds too far *and also* prevent the analog components from being maxed out.
Hope that made some amount of sense. Feel free to google something like "bit perfect volume", "audio clipping" and "double amping" (aka, Zuperdac amplifier connected to Magni amplifier) to see what I'm talking about.
@JiveAmpersand @mashto93 Putting the ZuperDAC at 100% makes it a line out signal, bypassing the ZuperDAC's amp. After finally getting a chance to listen today, I wanted to report back that I am getting a noticeably fuller sound. (Amped with the Magni 1 and listening on the HiFiMan HE 4XX.)
Earlier I hadn't realized the ZuperDAC could do that, and that's where @rampantandroid 's info above would have helped most.
From the Zorloo website under the last section: "ZuperDAC uses the latest ESS ES9601 headphone driver. It delivers unmatched performance for audio headphone or line-out output."