On Mon, 15 Jan 2018, Takashi Iwai wrote:
OTOH, the amplification in softvol is really dumb, and such a high gain like 90dB is doubtful whether it's really useful. As Jaroslav already suggested, we need a better setup to get more meaningful results.
Hi Takashi,
I didn't really get a definitive response to my elaboration last week regarding the maximum allowable gain value for the softvol plugin.
First of all, regarding the algorithm itself used, as it stands today it can handle a maximum of 90.3 dB gain without falling apart (as the gain factor is held in a signed integer). Changing the maximum allowable gain from 50 dB to 90 dB does not impact the algorithm or existing functionality in any way, it just changes the allowable maximum to correspond to the technical limit of the current algorithm. The limit is not visible to the user anyway until he tries to configure a max_dB that is above 50 (and then only in the shape of an error message). So from a purely technical viewpoint I cannot understand any opposition.
You mentioned that the amplification is really dumb, I'm not sure what the problem is, perhaps you could elaborate, essentially a gain is a multiplication with a gain factor, and that's what softvol does.
Another issue is if such a large gain is useful. I would say that is up to the user, and of course, if you have a weak signal to start with, with, say, only 8 bits of resolution, adding 90 dB of gain is going to mean there's a lot of noise bits there, but the signal quality is of course not worse than it was to start with, just louder, and that's how any signal (digital or analog) behaves when gain is added.
But the bottom line of course is that you are the maintainer. So what would you consider a reasonable maximum gain that's more than 50 dB. 70 dB?
/Ricard