3.5 mm headphone jack and RCA output difference

[jimzhang]

Hi everyone,

I am not sure if you have tried this and found the difference:

The RCA output from a CD player seems to have a higher volumn than the 3.5mm output from a soundcard if they are connected to the same amplifier which remains the same volume. What makes the difference?

If I use a DCA connected with the sound card and use the DAC's RCA output to hook up the same amplifier, will it help to have a higher volume?

Thanks for any suggestion, explanations or links.

 

[tomlinscote]

Line level output should be standard but so should a lot of things! Maybe your CD players line level output is a higher value than that of the soundcard, of maybe the level adjusters on the soundcard are not set as high as they can go, you can look in the sound settings of the soundcard to check this or maybe the PC has altered the output level so you need to go into the soundsettings menu and look there.

Is it a real problem? If I switch between the CD player and the DVD player and the minidisc deck they are all slightyl different, some systems give you the option to trim the input gains of their imputs so you can equalise the signals coming in to avoid volume differences between sources, Onkyo AV amps and Naim uniti systems for example.

Tommo

 

[BigH]

Not on my soundcard, I think it depends on your soundcard settings, ahv eyou gone into the setting and take it off default and put in on the highest output? On mine it is FP Headphones, however that adds some bass so I use FP 2 speaker setting which is lower volume but better SQ. Louder is not neccessarily better.

 

[jimzhang]

Line level output should be standard but so should a lot of things! Maybe your CD players line level output is a higher value than that of the soundcard, of maybe the level adjusters on the soundcard are not set as high as they can go, you can look in the sound settings of the soundcard to check this or maybe the PC has altered the output level so you need to go into the soundsettings menu and look there.

Is it a real problem? If I switch between the CD player and the DVD player and the minidisc deck they are all slightyl different, some systems give you the option to trim the input gains of their imputs so you can equalise the signals coming in to avoid volume differences between sources, Onkyo AV amps and Naim uniti systems for example.

Tommo

Thank you for your reply. I just bought a HIFI system: Primare I22 + DALI IKON 2 MK 2. I am now using a Creative SoundBlaster Xtreme Audio PCI-E as the sound source. I just feel like the volumn is too low for Classic music. It is far away from a live performance I enjoyed before. If the sound card and DAC do not make any difference in terms of volumn, then would it be Primare I22's problem: its output power is too low? Its maximum volume is 79 and only if I turn it to 40 (4 ohms: 2* 160W, and 2* 80W into 8 ohms), everything seems okay for me...

So for the volume issue, where is the problem in my system? I am so confused...

 

[ReValveiT]

CD players have a standard output of 2.0 vrms, and most of the more evpensive DACs use this standard.

Many soundcards use the older (and more sensible IMO) standard of 1.3 vrms (or there abouts).