Will setting the pre-amplifier too low degrade the sound definition?

[inhahe]

I'm using PEACE. I have two of the bands (the two highest-frequency ones) set at +30 dB, and I think that was causing my music to fluctuate in volume constanlty, so following the advice of some people in this (I think?) forum I lowered the dB of the pre-amplifier.. I still had the problem so I just further lowered it today to -22 dB. I think the problem went away or mostly went away when I did that, but that seems like a really low number. I'm concerned that if the software is making the volume that low, then the range of values for the samples of sound after processing will be made really small (like, say, -100 to 100 instead of -32768 to 32767) and the definition/quality of the sound will suffer.. I haven't noticed it suffering, but I don't like degredation of quality even when I don't notice it.

So my question is, am I right that setting the pre-amp really low effectively lowers the bit-depth of the sound, and if it does, how low can it be set safely?

Oh, I should add that I counteract the effect of making the volume so low in the pre-amp by turning up the dial on the device I'm using.

Thanks

[inhahe]

After posting this I seemed to remember reading that APO uses floating points internally for the sound data, so I guess that answers my question, it shouldn't degrade the sound quality.

[Peter Verbeek]

You're probably right in saying that the usage of floating points would prevent sound quality degradation. I'm just wondering if you hear any degradation in quality. Our ears can be a good measure tool. At -22 dB the usage of integers in opposite to floating pointings must have a negative effect.

[Jonas Dahlinger]

Yes, floating point numbers are used internally, so during E-APO's processing, practically no quality degradation should happen at any level. Later, the samples have to be converted to integer values for output and there it depends on the sample format that you can configure in the control panel.