Meridian Unplugged - Powered by MrTechGuy.co.uk Forums Discussion Meridian - Streaming Sooloos Control:PC User Guide and Volume Levelling

I found this Sooloos Control:Web/Mac/PC Guide which has not kept up with the firmware updates, but nevertheless I found very helpful.

I am trying to set the Volume Levelling. In the zones menu, tools, under volume levelling, I toggled tracks, but to my hearing it makes no difference. Now I could not find the apply button at the bottom right that the manual insists must be clicked for the settings to take effect. So that may be the source of my problem.

Contrast this with the iTunes/iPod that ran the computer overnight to set all the levels in my collection and actually works.

This is not a critical issue for me, but does anyone have any experience here to help me out?

Aloha,

Not that it should matter, but did you try setting it with your C15? I haven't used volume leveling in awhile but it worked fine when I did. It was surely several firmware updates ago.

Hi Bill,

Thanks for your help.

Yes I did it on the C15 and I checked it on the Control:PC that the setting was made. It registered there so something seems to have been set. But it doesn't make any difference. In the early am when I am working with quiet shuffled background music, The Who will come on suddenly at plus many dB and my significant other gives me a lecture on consideration of sleeping partners.

I have sent a recquest to the dealer that I bought it from to see how well the new M service model works - or doesn't?

Aloha,

For best sonics, leave volume leveling off.
I really can't imagine there is that great a difference in base levels between CD's....

Hi G997,

I had that concern but M says:
"To ensure best sound quality, Sooloos applies an intelligent volume adjustment at the start of each album or song rather than compression."
Actually I have found the opposite, perhaps due to my wide range in genres, but there is a very large range in volumes, hence my trying to make this work.

Aloha,

The culprit is The Who

I'll try it out and report back. I have to remember the song that made me realize it was working. It was an 80s recording that was overcompressed and had a low level on the CD compared to something more recent. The level was clearly raised because the hiss level was elevated as well. When I turned the leveling off, it was very noticeable.

Try any of Ry Cooder's. I always find his levels very low.

Hi Bill,

Actually in a funny way I think you are partially right. I have a few albums like this, Jimi Hendrix et al, that are by far the worst culprits. But even though it defies the laws of probability, they are the ones who want to play early in the morning when I am enjoying a pleasant low volume background shuffle while my wife sleeps in. If she is woken up early, she is not interested in the strange aberrations to the laws of probability, compression, volume levelling limitations, or even the meaning of life. Her focus tends to be on making the closest individual, which would be me, paying for her being woken up.

Ok, back to serious, this is not a big issue for me, but it would be nice to have everything play back at a reasonably equal level regardless of how many drugs the studio engineer was on, and it is fun to try to figure it out. The iTunes/iPod did an absolutely noticeable and terrific job of volume levelling which is nice on my long plane trips to not suddenly get blasted or have to turn up the quiet passages to hear them over the engine noise. It may very well be compression and I may be losing some SQ, but given the rest of the system, I can�t tell.

On the other hand I cannot hear any levelling with the C15 on any tracks. Of course it could be more subtle than the iPod and it is working but not so much that I notice it, but it seems to me that it is not working at all. So I am wondering if I did something wrong in the set up. When you turned on your volume levelling did you do what I did as I said in my first post. Did the C15 or Control:PC go through any lengthy adjustment cycle like my iTunes did? Can you hear a noticable difference on just your most significant tracks or is it almost too subtle to hear, or do you notice it very clearly like I do with the iPod?

Aloha,

Any consensus yet on what Volume Leveling is supposed to do versus reality. We haven't found any effect of ticking the album or track leveling options in Control:PC for our MC200. Particularly noticeable if your queue includes CDs from the LOUD era (eg, recent U2, P!nk, ...) with older disks. I would have thought the algorithm would derive the average or peak volume of each track or album (depending on ticked box) and adjust track to track, or album to album volume accordingly.

Hi Vorticity,

The reality for me is that it does nothing.

I have followed the new rules and 3 times put an inquiry into my "dealer" but as yet have no reply.

I would hope that the "supposed to do" is the same as my iPod does: level out the volumes so everything is a similar volume.

I think there is a glitch in setting it up, but until someone irons this out with M as far as I can see it doesn't work.

Aloha,

I have never been able to get volume levelling working either, maybe because it is not an "all Meridian" system.

And yes, there are BIG differences between levels in the files on this Sooloos system. With headphone listening it means volume adjustment with the Nuforce DAC-9.

It is a bit of a pain when using swim as levels between tracks can vary a lot. I've got around that for listening in another room using analog feed out of the MS600 (via a distribution amp) by inserting a remote controlled volume on the line in to another amplifier. But I guess for background music it is less important.

John

Well, the Sooloos does indeed calculate the relative peaks and Gain of the various CD's and Tracks

See the below information from the Sooloos Debug screen........the first Track is slightly older, while the 2nd Track is from a 2011 popular release

Tracks {
TrackName "Temptation"
TrackId 0s'3:1:eb8d5561-7e9e-4c6e-80d7-6a120c5bfe0f'
Length 268
IsPick f
IsUnpick f
TrackNumber 3
PlaybackOptions {
RealStartMs 0
RealEndMs 267720
NoiseStartMs 182
NoiseEndMs 265148
Gain -2.45000004768372
Peak 0.0
}
FileName "track03.FLAC"
FileInfo {
FileSize 26833667l
FileType "FLAC"
SampleRate 44100
BitsPerSample 16
ChannelCount 2


Tracks {
TrackName "Rumour Has It"
TrackId 0s'3:1:b90ade39-31e3-475d-a7d5-c0539b830522'
Length 223
IsPick t
IsUnpick f
TrackNumber 2
PlaybackOptions {
RealStartMs 0
RealEndMs 223266
NoiseStartMs 364
NoiseEndMs 218738
Gain -10.5
Peak -0.0199999995529652
}
FileName "track02.FLAC"
FileInfo {
FileSize 25827737l
FileType "FLAC"
SampleRate 44100
BitsPerSample 16
ChannelCount 2