 Home of the Squeezebox™ & Transporter® network music players.
Digital Volume Control and SNR  From SqueezeboxWiki  Jump to:
navigation, search  Found this post by Sean Adams about volume
control and Signal to Noise Ratio in the forum and thought it
would be useful to enough folks that it should be posted here in
the Wiki:   " I think the easiest way to understand this is to
forget about numbers, decibels, and bits per sample for a
minute, and just think about what's coming out of the DAC.  To
oversimply only slightly: there are two things always coming
from the DAC. 1) signal and 2) noise.  The level of the noise
output stays the same no matter what signal level is being
produced. That is really important to understand!  When the DAC
is making a loud signal, there is a lot of signal and a little
noise. That's a high SNR, which is good.  However, when the DAC
is making a quiet signal, you have a little signal and a little
noise. If we now consider the noise level in relation to the
signal level, the noise is