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No you haven't e: to further, I don't understand why you think that would affect dynamic range. Dynamic range being the difference between the quietest and lou
by ubercow13 13y ago
No you haven't
e: to further, I don't understand why you think that would affect dynamic range. Dynamic range being the difference between the quietest and loudest parts of a song. If the loud bit is 10 times the volume of the quiet bit, and you reduce the volume of the whole song uniformly to 1/10 of its original volume, the loud bit is still 10 times the volume of the quiet bit
- baddox 13y agoYou've failed to consider the way that digital audio works. If you have a 16 bit audio file, each sample can take on 2^16 values. If you reduce the volume in software, then each sample of the audio stream can take on fewer than 2^16 values. In the extreme case, you could reduce the volume in software so much that each sample can only take on a tiny number of values, in which case the audio will probably be unrecognizable.
- ubercow13 13y agoYes I'm well aware of that but that isn't what dynamic range is referring to in the above. The only thing you affect by reducing the volume in a digital signal is increasing the noise floor, or decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio. 16-bit audio already has a noise floor well below what a human can hear for a recording which has a "normal" volume as you might find on any CD. On top of this, when you use replaygain in your audio player, the digital volume adjustment is applied to a 24bit signal, and Windows (or whatever OS) has a 24bit or 32bit float signal path, and then most or all DACs are 24bit (for example newish Realtek integrated audio). So it really makes no difference to effective SNR either.