Saturday, 2 August 2025

Another Digital Volume Control Article 🙂 (Guest post by Bennet Ng)

Back in 2019 I wrote the article "Why We Should Use Software Volume Control / Management" which not only addressed about intersample overs, but also floating point induced clipping which cannot be solved by having intersample headroom in the DAC. (For a quick listening test, try the files in this thread on ASR). However it seems that some people are still not happy with the proposed solutions (e.g. ReplayGain) and resort to some other methods. For example in some of the recent blog comments someone mentioned about BitShiftGain.

Here is a snippet from the BitShiftGain website:

Digital audio is like some crystalline structure: it’s fragile, brittle, and suffers tiny fractures at the tiniest alterations. There’s almost nothing you can do in digital audio that’s not going to cause some damage. But as long as you stick to 6 dB steps and rigidly control the implementation (BitShiftGain doesn’t even store the audio in a temporary variable!), you can chip away at that least significant bit, and the whole minutes-or-hours-long crystalline structure of digital bits can remain perfectly intact above it.