[vorbis] (Un)Usefulness of Vorbisgain?

[David Tenser]

Thanks for clearing that up for me. I have no problem accepting this 
fact as I've encountered this problem myself. This is actually the first 
time I feel like turning Replay Gain on! I feel just as much that I 
should get a better sound card.

If I set the sound card to output in digital signal only, will it still 
have this problem?

Erik Stenborg wrote:
> If you listen to the file you would notice.... ;)
> 
> The big problem with soundcards, and Sound Blaster Live in particular, is
> not noise floor creeping up too high when you lower the volume, but
> distortion when you play things at full scale. People who measured this
> said it distorts sometimes down to -6 dB of full scale. So my pont was:
> you will probably gain quality from lowering the volume some, and why not
> using vorbis gain for this?
> 
> /Erik
> 
> On Tue, 25 Jun 2002, David Tenser wrote:
> 
> 
>>I fail to see how this was a reply to my original post...?
>>
>>Erik Stenborg wrote:
>>
>>>I will quote Frank Klemm:
>>>
>>>Overload is a problem of all gadgets which do audio processing.
>>>These are lossy codec and also the processing inside ever D/A converter.
>>>
>>>Download http://www.uni-jena.de/~pfk/mpp/audio2/overloadtest.zip
>>>unpack it and
>>>
>>>listen to the WAV directly
>>>encode it with mppenc and listen with "mppdec"
>>>... listen with "mppdec --scale 0.5"
>>>
>>>end quote
>>>
>>>Try to play this file at full scale and then halve the volume with some
>>>audio editor (CEP or whatever) and listen again.
>>>
>>>/Erik
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>>I'm using a Sound Blaster Live 1024 card. Don't ask me if it's good or 
>>>>bad... Anyway, every decibel makes a difference. The soundcard is 
>>>>definitely the weak link in the sound chain, and if I have to turn the 
>>>>signal down even more with Reply Gain, I can might as well raise/lower 
>>>>the volume knob whenever a song is louder/quiteter than the others.
>>>>
>>>>Besides, I always "master" the poor recordings before compressing them 
>>>>to ogg. (Using Cool Edit 96; a special disortion to remove peaks, 
>>>>normalize, noise reduction; the result is always better than the original)
>>>>
>>>>I think it's a good thing that Replay Gain exists, and I'll add the tag 
>>>>info to my ogg files just in case, but personally, I'll probably never 
>>>>use it.
>>>>
>>>>If someone could make a receiver that could get this replay gain data 
>>>>and adjust the volume from there instead, *that* would be something! But 
>>>>weakening the signal from the source is not an option, for me.
>>>
> 
> 
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