10-Jan-2016, 21:48
A slight reminder for people using Phantom's Optical input:
To get full signal quality, you should only use the Phantom's internal Volume Control (via Spark), and set source volume on TV/Sonos/etc to 100%. (Proper TV's normally set output level to 100% automatically through optical and disallow changing it from TV's controls).
If you change volume on the source device and output via optical output, what the source device is doing is aplying negative gain (such that some bits turn to 0) effectively reducing bit-resolution. Every time you reduce volume on the source, you simply lose the information in those bits, so instead of 24bit you are now playing 20bit, and instead of 16bit you are playing 12bit etc.
To get full signal quality, you should only use the Phantom's internal Volume Control (via Spark), and set source volume on TV/Sonos/etc to 100%. (Proper TV's normally set output level to 100% automatically through optical and disallow changing it from TV's controls).
If you change volume on the source device and output via optical output, what the source device is doing is aplying negative gain (such that some bits turn to 0) effectively reducing bit-resolution. Every time you reduce volume on the source, you simply lose the information in those bits, so instead of 24bit you are now playing 20bit, and instead of 16bit you are playing 12bit etc.
