[MLA] Normalizing on Tidal

[Grimm | Eelco]

Hi Kevin,

> As an aside, a couple years ago I did some design work for commercial mic preamps and found that analog control of amplifier gain is not often a win. The best solution is often just to make a nice quiet constant gain amplifier, connect to a quality ADC and do all your level control digitally.

Yes ideed... In my experience you need _a lot_ of experience and knowledge to design an analogue volume control incl. driving stages that has THD at -110 dB or so and low noise at the same time. DA's and (to a lesser extend) AD's beat that figure, certainly if they're not driven to full scale. So in general you can say digital volume control is more transparent than analog. Of course reality is more complex, but in broad lines this is true.

> I'm pretty sure the same would apply to headphone outputs for portable players.

Yes, certainly because building high quality analog stages is an expensive and current-hungry affair...
But of course the DA's in those devices are not stellar performers either, let alone the ear buds.

Cheers,
Eelco