I have a very basic question that is bothering me.

[rcat]

What has the potential to introduce the most "distortion" when turned up high: the Windows volume control (which I'm assuming controls the plugin or onboard soundcard); Or the volume control that controls the volume of the application being used; say, Windows Media Player or something similar? Thanks.

[Astralv]

I have no idea. Most software apps have a meter. If you see it distorted- it is clipping. Sound cards can distort at lower volumes is they are not professional. Windows volume control or Windows Media Player have nothing to do with making music. If you listening music, try Spotify or Pandora forums.

[Nystul]

In a floating point format like DAWs use internally, sample data can be stored with values higher than the full scale reference. But that reference is there for a reason. Wherever the audio is going to leave in a fixed format (which eventually has to happen), you cannot have it over full scale or the information is lost to clipping. So lets say your media player streams audio to the sound card at 24 bit, or you export a track on your DAW to 16 bit so it can go on a CD. And in those cases your track was so hot that it had peaks over full scale. The distortion introduced at that point cannot be undone by lowering the Windows / sound card driver volume control.

So basically if the track is hot enough to cause clipping, the gain should be lowered sooner rather than later. In the player or DAW rather than the system sound controls.

[rcat]

Actually, I'm talking about playback only here. Let's say I'm playing back a pre-recorded music file: an mp3, flac, etc., through my media player app (mine is VLC media player) which has it's own volume control that functions independently from Windows volume control. I'm assuming that the VLC volume control is adjusting the volume level virtually through the app itself, and the Windows volume control is adjusting the volume level of the hardware/firmware chips on the motherboard or soundcard. My question is which volume control has the most potential to introduce unwanted "noise", or signal degradation as/when the volume is turned up higher?

[thecontrolcentre]

The media player.

[RunBeerRun]

The media player.

Yeah, I use virtual audio cable with VLC, and VLC can go way past 100% volume, so I've seen this.

[camsr]

This is like a pop-quiz or something.
The windows mixer is digital. I used to think that the volume level may be controlled by the soundcard with a signal sent to it, but that wouldn't work with overload limiters like my onboard sound has. If the max bitdepth signal was always being sent to the soundcard, how could it mix more sources and apply a brickwall limiter to the output without clipping? Maybe their is more bitdepth somewhere in the system...
I don't even know for certain if it's the windows mixer or the soundcard doing the limiting
This is all extremely funny to me, the cheapest stuff is impossible to get specs on.

[do_androids_dream]

The media player.

Yeah, I use virtual audio cable with VLC, and VLC can go way past 100% volume, so I've seen this.

I could be wrong but it seems that if you push vlc past 100% some sort of compressor/limiter kicks in?

[thecontrolcentre]

The media player.

Yeah, I use virtual audio cable with VLC, and VLC can go way past 100% volume, so I've seen this.

I could be wrong but it seems that if you push vlc past 100% some sort of compressor/limiter kicks in?

Not on my setup. Turning VLC up much over 100% leads to distortion. I leave it set on 100% and adjust the volume from my audio interface.

[RunBeerRun]

Yeah, VLC distorts. I think they've been reducing the max allowed volume in newer builds.