Volume Question

A quick question for those in the know:

The volume knob on my 950 goes from +10 to -80 and reads in dB, so the total volume range is 90 dB.

Now, we know that every 3 dB represents a doubling of power, so that's a total of 30 doublings.

People who work with computers know that ten doublings (2^10) is roughly a thousand. So, that's three of those, or a range of roughly 1,000,000,000. In actuality, it's more: about 1.07 billion.

Does this really mean that the 950 can attenuate a signal, accurately, by a factor of over a billion? That doesn't seem quite right.


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Matthew J. Hill
matt@idsi.net

A billion is right. The loudness scale is logarithmic. The difference between -80 and +10 is nine logs (factors of ten). A billion is ten to the ninth power (nine factors of ten).

Not accurately, there is a noisefloor away from the lab-bench and some irregulareties in the db-steps, but accurately enough for my purposes most definately.

Yeah, but this one goes to 11!

The 950 is somewhat infamous for it's poor noise floor. That's probably one reason why no new 950's are being sold these days. But on the other hand, the Sept/Oct Issue of Perfect Vision praises the 1066's noise floor. You can read all about it since the issue is on newsstands now.

My opinion :

But the Perfect Vision *missed* that the 1066's bass management doesn't work properly. (That same redirection for the 5.1 analog inputs and 2 channel analog bypass mode.) So makes me wonder about the rest of review.

But they probably did get a 1066 after the noise fix (internal ground or something that was fixed early on).

Is'nt the 1066 "broken" in just the same way that the 950's BM is? Perhaps they take the same line as the Outlaws: "It's a feature, not a bug."

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Matthew J. Hill
matt@idsi.net

Charlie: Do you have a bad stomach? I thought you were off buying test equipment for your gear?

[This message has been edited by AndersP (edited August 29, 2002).]

Don't understand 'bad stomach', maybe something is lost in translation?

Anyway, I'm waiting for a new calibrated mic/preamp and a so forth, but I'm not actually standing with my nose to the glass...

PS - The '11' reference is to an obscure movie. The actor was insisting on getting an amplifier (IIRC) that had a knob labeled to '11' rather than the more capable amplifier that went to '10'......

[This message has been edited by charlie (edited August 29, 2002).]

I got it charlie! I guess some have not seen the movie!

Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Let's just hope Nigel and company can find the stage...

Oh heck. A blurb on the 11 volume quote is being shown on MTV's Rock on Hollywood commercial almost every other half hour.