3. Is there a qualitative difference between changing the volume within youtube, my...

Is there a qualitative difference between changing the volume within youtube, my computer settings, or the knob on my speakers?

The biggest effect in play here is the concept of Dynamic Range, clipping, and noise. Dynamic Range is a digital concept and occurs on your PC, and noise is an analog concept (ie your speakers). Clipping can be either digital or analog.

Take the system as three audio "processes": 1. Youtube plays sound (Youtube volume control) 2. Sound goes through Windows/Mac to sound card (system volume control) 3. Sound is played through speakers (speaker volume control).

Say the Youtube volume is turned to be extremely quiet. Well, not all sounds are the same volume, and if you make it too quiet you will lose some of the "quieter" sounds in the video - they will get rounded down to 0 (since the computer stores things digitally, everything gets rounded). If this happens, then no matter how loud you make your computer or speaker volume, you will not be able to regenerate these lost sounds. But practically speaking, this is unlikely to happen because computers have quite a good dynamic range, that is they can store very "quiet" audio and very "loud" audio in the same file.

On the flip side, if Youtube is too loud, it may try to output something louder than your computer can store in memory. If this happens, it will output a signal where the values that are too loud are "clipped", and your audio will be distorted. There is no way to undo this distortion, even turning down the sound on the PC or speakers will just decrease the volume, but the sound will still be distorted.

Assuming the Youtube volume is appropriate (not too quiet or too loud), the effect of having your PC volume too quiet or loud is exactly the same as Youtube.

Now we move to the analog portion: your speakers. Analog devices are susceptible to noise. Typically this will scale with the volume of the device (when you turn your speakers all the way up, you hear a hissing even if there is nothign playing from the PC). This is exactly what will happen if the volume from the PC going to it is too quiet, and you use the speakers volume to increase it: You will amplify the sound, as well as noise. This is bad. Sou ideally, you want to increase the speaker volume as a last resort.

So, TL;dr: Youtube volume: Cant be too quiet or too loud PC volume: Cant be too quiet or too loud Speaker volume: Try to keep as low as possible, increase Youtube and PC volume first.

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