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

Just for info, the MC200 does do comms via Speakerlink (via reviver in my case) to speakers, giving volume control.

Hi Vorticity,
I have no technical knowledge to support this, but my experience is that it cuts back everything to the lowest common denominator. The volume reduction ranges from a lot to a little. While I used to set the volume at 35 in the early mornings with my wife still asleep I now go with 45. And my preferred average has gone from 55 to 65. I have found no example of increased volume.

Now the super naive question of the day. Can't someone use the data talked about on this thread for the computer to just automatically turn down the volume without any compression or limiting or whatever i.e. no loss in SQ. I mean a robot can vacuum my floor; surely it can turn down the volume. If I put my iPhone dB meter on my vacuum cleaner and put it in front of the volume knob? It seems so obvious to me, so I must be missing something.

Aloha,

This is exactly what Meridian should be doing; using the Meridian comms to change the gain of the amps after the DACs, be they in the processor or in DSP speakers. Digital attenuation reduces resolution even with 24 bit signals.

This is also how multi-channel speaker SPL calibration should be done. (search for George�s +3dB tweak, I think it is in that thread).

We have discussed before 'relatively easy' is would be for Meridian to extend the current comms commands to enable this.

Regards,
Carl

For what it's worth, the dynamics of my ID40->DSP8000s suffered greatly after turning on "Volume leveling". Turning it back off solved that problem!

Exactly what I found also.

Found this thread while trying to figure out what volume levelling does exactly. Levelling seems to work in conjunction with crossfade set to 5 (I didn't try any other values - someone here I think said 4, so used that as reference, adding 1 for good measure).

I want to use this feature for dinner party background music and �while it seems to work for locally stored music,�it doesn't appear to work when a streaming (Rhapsody) track comes along. I assume that's because all the streaming tracks have gain stored as 0.0 in the metadata.

For what it's worth,

Soundserge

Also, for this party playlist scenario crossfade doesn't work when transitioning between tracks of different resolutions - at least not on the 818/ID41 where there is an audible click coming from the 818 when switching from one resolution to another, e.g. 44K/16 to 96K/24. Almost sounds like a relay as it's locking on to new frequency and for whatever reason these different frequency tracks can not be mixed together.

I don't recall this happening with the MS600.

Soundserge

Has anyone actually gotten volume levelling working in a way that does not harm the sound quality?

I use the replay gain plugin for dBpoweramp to tag all my files and on software players this seems to at least work without the deleterious effects that Sooloos shows.

Is this feature of Sooloos just broken or is it simply a working example of a flawed implementation?

Cheers,

Tony.