Volume control over Bluetooth

2019-07-03 05:54:03

Hi. Recently I came to wonder about best practices when listening to music via Bluetooth. I.e. how to set volume on both transmitting and receiving device to save dynamic range of source material? I went through this Quora topic but found community's posistion inconsistent.
Now I know that BT already does lossy compression, even with apt-X and similar, but raising volume above certain level additionally introduces clipping artifacts. On the other hand, making source too quiet flattens the dynamic range, right?
How can I be certain that source material's dynamic range hasn't deteriorated? If I cannot, than how to limit this effect?
I use Samsung Galaxy S7 and Dell Latitude E5450 (with foobar2000) as sources, and FiiO BTR3 and Philips BT atapter hooked to Yamaha stereo amp. as DACs an the other end of BT transmission.

Re: Volume control over Bluetooth

Reply #1 – 2019-07-04 17:56:50

To the best of my knowledge, volume control in digital audio is most of the time an attenuator.
If you put Win volume control at 100% it is unity gain so no alteration of the volume.
This is probably your best bet, source at 100% , sink (the Bluetooth receiver) does the volume control. But of course you can fool around a little, source at 100%, sink at a acceptable level and the reverse, sink at 100% , volume control by the source.
Maybe you do hear a difference but don’t be surprised if you don’t