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Optimal settings for X-Fi + Amp?

D

Darnell

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 20, 2008
Messages
178
Just received a Little Dot II that I bought secondhand from Ourfpshero. I'm excited to figure out the correct/best/most fun way to use this setup.
Currently the amp is at about 50%, and on Creative Volume Panel thing I have headphone volume at 100% and speaker volume at 20%.

Any suggestions?
 
Digital volume settings should be at 100% unless you need to reduce them as a workaround (e.g. to decrease the resolution of the volume knob). Tubes should be allowed to warm up for a couple minutes before use. What headphones are you driving with it?

I'm using a moderately tweaked LD IV amp...they're really nice without completely trashing your budget.
 
Wow 100%? I'm using Beyerdynamic DT770 with this amp. Its warming up now while I clean up this desktop which is a fire hazard with this amp on.
 
Cool, it does a great job with the 250ohm version. And yeah, it gets a bit warm...tubes are old school. It would also be really depressing if something fell on it and busted one of the tubes...

The 100% thing is to take the digital elements out of the equation as much as possible, and to a small extent to avoid distortion due to a lot of rounding when you scale the signal digitally. Depending on the algorithm, putting volume at 20% digitally could mean you're giving it 1/5th the dynamic range as well...while there are ways to avoid this, and it should be avoided...there's no way to know what program is doing what stupid thing to your data. Just leave it on 100% whenever possible and either turn the amp up or down as needed so it uses a purely analog method of scaling the signal amplitude.
 
Eh. In general, the more it needs an amp to start with, the more the amp will show up in the result. But I wouldn't go out and try to rebuy the 250s instead either. The different impedance versions are pretty much the same other than the load they present, and that mostly affects where you'll want to set the volume dial to get a comfortable level.
 
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