interesting, what about windows XP ? lower down wave / master volume or both ? keep game volume at 100% ?
The problem occurs when the total mix sound (which is why you have a sound mixer) is passed onto you soundcard and made analog, so it doesn't matter what OS you are using, since inside of XP for example everything is digital. It also doesn't matter if you lower the master volume or just the game volume.
My advice would be lowering you master volume because then you lower all volume and when you up the volume of your speakers than you up the total volume of all sounds
Also (and this is interesting if you want to be able to crank up the volume to as high as you want and not want to speakers to ever blow up); there should be a balance of 0db at all times. What does that mean?
You can devide sound into three catagories:
-high (treble)
-mid
-low (bass)
4db is considdered neutral. This is called 0db, because it is neutral.
When you up the low (bass) +1 than the total will be 1db (above 4db, so 4+1=5db. 5db > 4db limit and thus distortion) and so you'll need to lower the mid or the high (treble) with -1 to have 4db and thus 0db total.
You see this with pop music; in order to make the music louder, producers up the treble and lower the bass. MP3's are all bassy and thus the treble is reduced. Commercials all sound louder than the tv show you are watching, while at the same db, because they up the treble and mid and reduce the bass a lot.
You, however, need a mixer for this if your speakers combine the mid, highs and lows. But if you have an external amplifier that has a circuitry that devides the sound into 3 signals: mid, high and low (this is usualy inside of your speakers) and you have speaker boxes that each have 3 speakers inside of them (these are the mid, highs and lows!) then distortion will
never occur and you will
not be able to blow up your speakers! (unless ofcourse you put the volume soooooo hard that you speakers physically blow themselves out of you speakerbox xD)
So why are there 150 dollar sound cards then? That is not because they produce better sound quality (nope...) but because they can handle an extreme amount of channels (fatal1ty sound cards come to mind) and are solely for studio mixing and serround gaming.
So the rule of thumb: keep you OS master volume low, buy 3 speakers holding speakerboxes and a decent external amplifier (but these are usually build into your speakers) and you will never blow up your speakers and you can crank the latest heavy metal Slipknot or Hardstyle out of your speakers at max volume and +4 bass and +4 treble (but only if you set the bass and treble on your external amplifier) and you will never hear distortion and you will never blow up your speakers.
However... some n00bish recordings are mastered with terrible distortion (above 0db neutral) and these recordings will always sound like shit, but it is not you speakers that are blowing up. I get this a lot with YouTube uploaded hardstyle recordings <_<'
Thank you for the lol, I needed that.
The 2x = +3 is correct, but the decibel is an expression of an exponent, so a negative dB value has NOTHING to do with the sign of the value. You must have been working with dBW figures, which is entirely different.
I though that you were reffering to the analog output signal... But nice trolling -_-'
PS: The decibel is a measure of sound intensity, with the function of power ratio between two sounds.