From: Guillaume Cocatre-Zilgien <guillaume_at_cocatre.net>
Date: Sun, 21 Jul 2013 20:19:04 +0200

Hello,

I would like to see some discussion (and eventually, an authoritative
decision or consensus) regarding the recent increase in resolution of
volume and equalizer handling, from 0.5dB to 0.1dB.

I highly doubt that a 0.1dB difference is at all audible. Moreover, it
will probably do absolutely *nothing* on targets with hardware that
doesn't support it, which I bet means a lot of devices.

I'm pretty sure that 0.5dB is hardly audible for the very large
majority of people to begin with (saratoga seems to think so), though
I think it's nice to be able to change volume or an equalizer band by
25% or 75% of "double the volume", i.e. 1.5dB or 4.5dB, compared to
3dB (50%) or 6dB (100%).

I wouldn't bring this up if it improved anything at all (I don't think
it does), and if it didn't degrade basic functionality (getting the
graphical EQ to the desired values is a lot slower) or downright
*broke* it (the current git revision badly breaks volume control on
the Fuze+).

It seems that the patch (and commit) were validated a bit hastily, by
few people, and without much thought given to the consequences.

Unless someone demonstrates a significant advantage that I haven't
thought of, and / or fixes volume control AND the sluggishness of
dealing with 0.1dB increments in the graphical equalizer, I would like
this change to be completely reverted. Soap, on IRC, proposed that
such fine-grained values be accepted in the configuration file, but
not reflected in the user interface. That sounds perfectly acceptable
to me, and would probably satisfy the most "enthusiastic" users,
without bugging everyone else.

I was asked to provide a patch, but it seems to me that changing the
initial two lines that specify the increments, wouldn't be enough,
given that more recent modifications were made to deal with the lower
value. I am not able to provide a patch that would completely revert
all related changes, with absolute certainty of doing it right.

Guillaume Cocatre-Zilgien
Received on 2013-07-21