Article: Variable Gain Volume Control

[ted_b]

The is a nice series to show here on AS.  Gets me thinking about volume controls and the plethora of places we can often find them in the computer audio signal path.  Software players have them; dacs can have them; preamps, of course, are the classic place they exist...and even some power amplifiers have them (gain switches, etc).  There are philosophies that each support a different place to do them correctly.  For example, digital attenuation with upsampled material, throwing away "unnecessary bits" that do little or no harm!  Bypass this or that volume control...are we really bypassing, or are we paying even a small price.  Argh.  It might make sense (or maybe it's already out there; haven't searched) to have a thread discussing these different ideas of where to attenuate the most effectively.