But if you don't hear any baseline noise (Edit: with no music playing of course!) then the voltage gain clearly isn't too high. The only thing the number of bits determines is the dynamic range, that's all. That's why I think it's unfortunate that it's often referred to as resolution (i.e higher amount of bits -> better resolution) which to me would imply that a higher amount of bits leads to more "detail" or whatever in the music, which simply is not true, it just gives you more available dynamic range. And you can test yourself how much dynamic range you actually need while listening to music, just play music through a player that lets you adjust the volume in dB, play at a level you would normally play and then instantly reduce the volume by say 60 dB. It will probably barely be audible until your ears have adjusted to the lower volume which takes a while. You can repeat this until you find which level of reduction is required for you to hear nothing directly after reducing the volume. I did this myself some time ago and IIRC I found that reducing the volume by -70 dB was enough for me to hear nothing at all, or just under 12 bits of dynamic range.@Schackmannen still, even if I don't hear the DAC's noise floor, I argue that if I need to set the digital volume to such a low setting (because the DAC's voltage gain is so high) that it leaves me with 8 bit audio then I'm doing something wrong. This IEM + DAC combination is a poor choice.
Sorry if this is off-topic @IVX
Last edited: