Headset Volume Concepts (am I an idiot)

[rumpeltechtips]

I really hope I don't sound like a fool asking this, but I couldn't figure out how to search for it. I recently bought a Corsair HS60 for my xbox one. I have it plugged into the 3.5mm jack on the wireless controller for context. I am curious if anyone can shed light on the concepts (maybe poor word choice) of how the different volume sliders/knobs that are utilized interact with each other and if there is any kind of common best practices, or at least things not to do that I should know about. Specifically I'm wondering which sliders/knobs should be up or down. In my setup, there is a physical volume knob on the headset itself, there is a 'global' volume slider in the Xbox's main menu, and there is a volume slider in the game itself. Is it better to have the game volume all the way up and adjust the xbox volume down? Or is it better to use the headset knob maxed out and the game audio low? These are the types of questions I am looking to get some insight on. 

[zeusthemoose]

Im on PC, but its kind of similar. I use the in-game audio to raise/lower when I have multiple programs open so I can hear all of them. I use system or on-headphone slider to control overall volume. I use whichever one is easier to access and leave the other at 100%.

[minibois]

58 minutes ago, rumpeltechtips said:

Is it better to have the game volume all the way up and adjust the xbox volume down? Or is it better to use the headset knob maxed out and the game audio low? These are the types of questions I am looking to get some insight on. 

It's best to adjust volume only with hardware sliders (AKA: your headset's volume slider). That way you know you're getting all the sound out of your game & console and are then adjusting it with hardware. No digital compression and such that way.

 

EDIT: to be clear, I suggest you set game/console sound to 100% (maybe with some adjustments to game effects/music/chat/etc. balance and be sure to not make yourself dead either )

[Spuriae]

The potentiometer on the headset is located in the cups, which means reducing the volume also results in increasing the output impedance of your amplifier, degrading the headphones' frequency response. With a few exceptions, such as with particularly efficient planar magnetic drivers, it is a bad idea to place a potentiometer directly before a headphone driver without some sort of buffer stage to fix the impedance issue.

 

Hardware volume control may be used for a number of reasons, but the only time it can possibly have an advantage in sound quality is when the thermal noise of the potentiometer is less than the digital quantization error from attenuation, which virtually never occurs on modern devices with 32+ bit processing.

 

There are other issues with keeping DACs set to 100% output, such as the digital filters being unable to handle intersample overs and poor performance near the DAC's Vref and power rails.

 

Overall, it's usually best to leave an analog control maxed out and control volume digitally. There are definitely exceptions, though.

 

Personally, not knowing anything about the Xbox audio handling, I'd max out game and physical volume controls and adjust system volume. Perhaps use a combination of both digital controls if the volume steps are too large with one of them maxed out.

[The Flying Sloth]

1 hour ago, Nimrodor said:

Snip

Digital volume controls artificially limit effective bit depth, physical controls just change the amount of power being sent, controlling physically is always preferable, that's why mixing desks, recording interfaces and high end amplifiers have physical volume controls.....

 

@Derkoli explains it much better than I ever could though. I don't have time to find his last explanation but if you'd like it will be in his post history somewhere.

[Derkoli]

No clue who to even quote here. But here goes:

 

In the vast majority of cases, it is best to use a hardware volume control (Such as physical knob/potentiometer)

 

Digital volume control (such as Windows volume) effectively controls the bit depth to control volume. Windows volume control has a measurable performance change due to all the processing that goes into digital volume control. Whether this is audible depends upon you and your audio gear. People who are trained in critical listening (such as myself, or alot of mastering engineers) can pretty easily pick out crappy digital volume control.

 

Firstly, all audio in a digital domain is represented as a floating point with a certain bit depth. CD's are 16 bit, FLAC is 16/24 bit, alot of studio gear uses a 32 bit floating point.

 

Windows converts ALL sound into the sample rate/bit depth that you define as your sound card using, in this window:

 

 

This is done to effectively simplify everything. The volume control + sound card only has deal with one sample rate/bit depth, not multiple. Your music player (Such as Tidal) might be spitting out 24/44.1kHz, and an email notification might be a simple low bit rate MP3 file. It's the best solution for 99.99% of people.

 

When you change your volume, You lose roughly 1 bit of dynamic range for every 6dB~ the volume is reduced. A 6dB change is 4x the signal loss/gain, so it's a good amount.

 

You can make digital volume control somewhat transparent by using a 24 bit volume control with a 16bit source. Or 32 bit with a 24 bit source, this is why studio gear tends to use 32 bit. It's technically transparent. Unless you're recording the amount of volume a large black hole will produce.

 

This is the reason DAC's that upsample can actually sound better, as the upsampling is done before volume control, So you have a 0 loss/transparent volume control.

 

Overall, an analogue volume control is most likely better. Alot of high end audio equipment uses analogue volume controls. Most studio gear uses analogue volume control. There's a reason for this.

 

@The Flying Sloth Better?

Edited July 21, 2020 by Derkoli
Bloody mistakes

[The Flying Sloth]

2 hours ago, Derkoli said:

Better?

Much so, thanks for the backup.

[Spuriae]

5 hours ago, Derkoli said:

In the vast majority of cases, it is best to use a hardware volume control (Such as physical knob/potentiometer)

This was true 10-20 years ago, before processing got a lot better and before the proliferation of cheap 32 bit delta-sigma ICs.

5 hours ago, Derkoli said:

Digital volume control (such as Windows volume) effectively controls the bit depth to control volume.

This is true. However, the processing bit depth is virtually always 32 bits. Even if you attenuate by 16 bits (which is absurd), there's still a full 16 bits of dynamic range remaining. Dynamic range limitations will NEVER be an issue on a properly configured modern computer. Quantization error might be under some circumstances, depending on the thermal noise contribution of the potentiometer. See Benchmark's application notes on the lengths they have to go to to make a low-noise attenuator.

5 hours ago, Derkoli said:

Windows volume control has a measurable performance change due to all the processing that goes into digital volume control. 

I'm not aware of any measurements showing this. Are you thinking of this article? Windows Directsound is measurably bad because it doesn't upsample frequency properly. To the contrary, it's lack of processing, rather than overprocessing, that in this case tends to cause issues.

 

I'm also not sure, but I think Directsound is deprecated now. At the very least it isn't the default in WIndows.

5 hours ago, Derkoli said:

People who are trained in critical listening (such as myself, or alot of mastering engineers) can pretty easily pick out crappy digital volume control.

Absolutely, if it's used wrong. Same goes for any filter; it's easy to pick out things that are incorrectly implemented.

5 hours ago, Derkoli said:

Windows converts ALL sound into the sample rate/bit depth that you define as your sound card using, in this window:

Everyone should change this to 32 bits, problem solved. Good point though, I forgot that setting has a silly default.

5 hours ago, Derkoli said:

When you change your volume, You lose roughly 1 bit of dynamic range for every 6dB~ the volume is reduced. A 6dB change is 4x the signal loss/gain, so it's a good amount.

6dB is 2x signal amplitude (gain), 4x signal power. Loudness scales with amplitude. 6dB = 2x = 1 bit by definition in a linear system.

5 hours ago, Derkoli said:

This is the reason DAC's that upsample can actually sound better, as the upsampling is done before volume control, So you have a 0 loss/transparent volume control.

DACs with dynamic range exceeding what the signal requires still have quantization noise. Upsampling is frequency, not amplitude. DACs that upsample tend to have better effective dynamic range due to noise shaping, which is a different effect.

5 hours ago, Derkoli said:

Overall, an analogue volume control is most likely better. Alot of high end audio equipment uses analogue volume controls. Most studio gear uses analogue volume control. There's a reason for this.

Even if an analog volume control were better in most cases, it definitely isn't in OP's. He's likely looking at something like a 100Ω+ potentiometer placed directly between the amplifier output and the headphone driver. Attenuating the signal using the potentiometer causes a huge impedance mismatch issue that's guaranteed to be far more noticeable than the hairs we're splitting in the high-end debate. Maxing out the pot removes the series resistor from the signal chain, flattening the headphone's frequency response.

 

[Derkoli]

1 hour ago, Nimrodor said:

I'm not aware of any measurements showing this. Are you thinking of this article? Windows Directsound is measurably bad because it doesn't upsample frequency properly. To the contrary, it's lack of processing, rather than overprocessing, that in this case tends to cause issues.

 

I'm also not sure, but I think Directsound is deprecated now. At the very least it isn't the default in WIndows.

Amir from ASR was planning to do an article on it, and has said many times in the past that it is genuinely measurable. Whether this is true or not is pretty much in the air right now.

 

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/myth-or-reality-volume-control-in-windows.2031/

 

1 hour ago, Nimrodor said:

Even if an analog volume control were better in most cases, it definitely isn't in OP's. He's likely looking at something like a 100Ω+ potentiometer placed directly between the amplifier output and the headphone driver. Attenuating the signal using the potentiometer causes a huge impedance mismatch issue that's guaranteed to be far more noticeable than the hairs we're splitting in the high-end debate. Maxing out the pot removes the series resistor from the signal chain, flattening the headphone's frequency response.

I didn't actually realise the pot in OP's setup comes after the amplifier.

 

In that case, then yes a digital volume control will be superior. It's pretty incompetent of a designer to put a potentiometer after an amplifier and before a pretty sensitive driver.

[rumpeltechtips]

Oh wow so many detailed replies. Thanks for the food for thought. So @Derkoli and @Nimrodor are in agreement that the headphones should be at max or close to it, and just adjust digitally through the xbox system? 

[Spuriae]

8 hours ago, Derkoli said:

Amir from ASR was planning to do an article on it, and has said many times in the past that it is genuinely measurable. Whether this is true or not is pretty much in the air right now.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/myth-or-reality-volume-control-in-windows.2031/

He's planning on showing the quantization error caused by the conversion from floating point back to integer bits. It'll definitely be measurable at 16 and maybe measurable at 24 bits, but at a true 32 bit depth it'll be well below the noise of the best electronics currently available.

 

Unless Microsoft managed to spectacularly screw up simple rounding. FWIW LSB errors at 32 bits are comparable to the thermal noise of a 1mΩ resistor. If your signal chain contains a series resistance of greater than 1mΩ, it likely has a larger contribution to noise than the digital volume control – even if the digital volume control isn't using dithering.

9 hours ago, Derkoli said:

It's pretty incompetent of a designer to put a potentiometer after an amplifier and before a pretty sensitive driver.

Unfortunately that's how most of the built-in volume controls on gaming headsets are done: toss a thumbwheel potentiometer between the connector and headphones. There's really nothing they can do about it; the marketing department demands a volume control on an analog headset, and the designer has to do the best they can with the components available.

[The Flying Sloth]

2 hours ago, Nimrodor said:

Unfortunately that's how most of the built-in volume controls on gaming headsets are done: toss a thumbwheel potentiometer between the connector and headphones. There's really nothing they can do about it; the marketing department demands a volume control on an analog headset, and the designer has to do the best they can with the components available.

This is why nobody here ever recommends anything with an inline volume knob, well, that and it's a massive point of failure compared to the relatively basic design of wired headphones.

[rumpeltechtips]

For clarification, the volume knob is located on the back of the left earcup, not on the wire. I'm not sure if that changes the calculus at all. 

[Spuriae]

28 minutes ago, rumpeltechtips said:

For clarification, the volume knob is located on the back of the left earcup, not on the wire. I'm not sure if that changes the calculus at all. 

It doesn't. Electrically it's still wired in series with both headphone channels.

[rumpeltechtips]

Follow up - I tried your suggestion last night. Turned the physical knob up nearly all the way. I do think this allowed for a bit more variance between the game and voice chat volumes than was previously the case.  Much appreciated for all the input. 

I'm still having controller connectivity issues, but I suppose I should start a new thread for that.