Digital gain vs analog gain

If your power amp has input level controls, as some vintage Crown amps did, I would suggest attenuating them to allow your analog preamp volume control to operate with normal listening at the noon mark or a bit above, and your DAC or source unattenuated (-0dB).  That way you avoid the loss of resolution from the source, and the nasties that most VC pots exhibit near full attenuation…at least try that and judge for yourself.

Boom!

@hilde45 

Yup, that's the reality.  One could almost say that the quality degradation of the audio signal from recording to reproduction at home is equal to the ignored information about the causes for this degradation. Something could be done because in the end it's all about gain. Using active speakers and  intelligent volume control would be the easiest way to approach this problem at the consumer level.

Just because you don't understand something doesn't make it automatically "utter nonsense".

@ -6db you have given away 50% of the SNR. Digital or otherwise.

Every analog stage has overload conditions. So it really helps to understand the rough signal level (e.g. RMS Voltage) expected at each link in your chain, and to ensure you leave ample overload margin for the downstream component to handle that signal level (overload margins are often spec’d relative to a given RMS Voltage input level).

Digital sources these days often have very hot output (sometimes well in excess of 4 Volts on XLR outputs), and I wouldn’t worry about the using a well-implemented digital volume control (lots of bit depth, 64 or more bits and dithering) to keep the output levels reasonable, or just to do some L/R channel rebalancing for your system - as long as you’re not using it to attenuate TOO much.

Depending on the gain structure of your system, if you have too much gain and very sensitive speakers, sometimes it can help to have additional analog attenuation further downstream in order to push down the noise floor relative to signal.