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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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Digital Drive Upsamplers, DACs, jitter, shakes and analogue withdrawals, this is it. |
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In Reply to: another thought posted by Leo loves music on April 22, 2025 at 19:06:15:
What do you mean by "hardware volume control". Do you mean an analogue volume control or additional electronic hardware to do the volume control external to the DAC? Neither is likely to be as good as doing the volume control internal to a DAC that internally converts and processes the incoming data at full 32 bit resolution because extending the signal path and routing the data to another circuit can only increase the noise floor.
In the case of the Benchmark DAC and other DACs using the ESS DACs (I'm not sure about the AKM DACs but I believe they are the same), they can achieve a full range of volume adjustment because they are using the full capability of the 32bit DAC so the 16 bit or 24 bit word is converted to 32bit and processed at that word length, therefore the volume can be adjusted with full precision down to the limits of the DAC itself. An analogue volume control can only be better than the -135dB range of the ESS DAC if it has lower noise...which is highly unlikely.
So the answer to your question is that it depends on the DAC and overall system design. Your concerns apply to older DAC designs from the early 2010s such as Cambridge Audio DACs (DacMagic plus) which had an 8 bit (-48dB) range of volume adjustment before bit truncation on a 24 bit word. NAD had a -66dB range which was very usable for "typical" listening behaviour.
Regards Anthony
"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.." Keats
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- RE: another thought - flood2 21:06:34 04/25/25 (0)
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