Re: Power supply and sound card volume

On 24 Aug 2006 17:18:42 -0700, "Dennis Q. Wilson"
<DennisQWilson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Bob Masta wrote:
On 23 Aug 2006 11:08:40 -0700, "Dennis Q. Wilson"
<DennisQWilson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Bob Masta wrote:
On 22 Aug 2006 18:39:23 -0700, "Dennis Q. Wilson"
<DennisQWilson@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

This may be a dumb question, but is there any relation between between
the capacity of the power supply and the volume output by my
motherboard's onboard sound card?

I have a 300-watt power supply in a case with an ECS nForce3-a mobo
that I just can't seem to squeeze any volume out of (specifically, from
the line-out jack). The connections, drivers, software settings and
speakers have all been checked and rechecked, and they all appear to be
correct. Another thing I checked was whether the nForce3-a onboard
sound card was generally considered to produce excee3dingly low volume,
and that doesn't seem to be the case either.

So I'm wondering if the power supply is the cause. Will I get louder
sound by installing a stronger power supply?


The power supply is not the cause. You don't mention anything
about your speakers: Line outputs are not suitable for driving
unpowered speakers, so that would explain your problem
right there. If your speakers *are* powered, I'd still look to
the speakers as the problem.

Darn it, I knew there was something I forgot to mention. The speakers
are of course powered, and they worked just fine with my old
motherboard and with my Walkman.

I didn't *think* the power supply could be the issue, but I think I've
eliminated everything else. It must that be the onboard sound card
itself, then, simply outputs a very low signal level. It's funny,
though, because if so, you'd expect there'd be more people complaining
about it on the web, and I found nary a peep.


Line-level outputs should be *reasonably* standard, somewhere
around 1 volt RMS at max. The card-to-card differences should
not be big enough to cause your problem. Is it possible that
there is some control setting in the Mixer that is messed up?
I'd pull up the full Mixer control panel and do some messing
around... can't hurt. Other than that, I'd wonder about the
program source... are you sure the levels are what you think
they are there? (If your mixer panel has a bar-graph meter you might
be able to get some indication of this.) After that, the only thing
left that I can think of would be bad connections, but those usually
manifest as intermittent or crackly/noisy.

Thanks, Bob. Well, I just dropped in a different sound card (PCI) and
got the same general lack of output volume. This led me to believe it
was a problem with the speakers, so I swapped out the speakers too and
still got the low volume. Again, the "mixer" settings are just fine.
I'm at a total loss to understand this.

Is it possible Windows XP -- or the ECS nForce3 motherboard itself --
ever uses some sort of gain control to prevent a volume over a certain
level from being output?


Well, there's volume and there's volume... ;-)
There are real volume controls (attenuators)
on the sound card that are accessed through the
Mixer control panel. These are the best way to
adjust volume, since they maintain the same
digital signal resolution and just operate in the
analog domain. However, Windows (stupidly,
IMHO) has no standards whatsoever for the
volume steps that the card uses. Every card maker
can use any old step size he wants, and there is
no way for a program to find out how big those
steps are. So setting (say) step #5 might be
5 dB below full-scale on one card, and 30 dB on
another. Windows apaprently expected that all
volumes would be set "by ear".

With the advent of DirectSound, Windows kernel
mixer allows digital mixing... just doing math on the sample
values from different signal streams. With this
system, if you (say) cut the values from one stream in half,
the volume always drops by 6 dB. So you do get absolute
control (on top of whatever the overal true mixer setting
is), but the price is that for large reductions you lose
digital resolution and the sound gets "gritty". For example,
if you reduce the volume by 48 dB on a 16-bit system,
you effectively have an 8-bit system. You lose 1 bit for each
6 dB reduction.

Well, all that long-winded discourse was a prelude to the
thought that maybe something (some other software)
is tweaking the kernel mixer. I'm not sure how to
diagnose that, but you might make sure that all other
programs are really closed.

Another approach, back on the conventional Windows
Mixer front, is to get a better view of what is really going
on in the mixer. A free program called Mixer Browser
shows you all the settings, possibly even those that
are not in your mixer panel. It's rather technical and
detail oriented, with no Help system, but it might give
a clue.

That's all I can think of for now. If I think of anything
else it will have to wait till Monday...I'm outa here!

Best regards,



Bob Masta
dqatechATdaqartaDOTcom

D A Q A R T A
Data AcQuisition And Real-Time Analysis
www.daqarta.com
Home of DaqGen, the FREEWARE signal generator
.

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