oftenfacetious said:
a cheap mini stereo double male plug to go from my fuze to my axillary in on my sony cd player.
sony cd player w/ infinity speakers
my questions
why would my sound be so much less volume on my cd player than my computer or a cd in my car? i dont max my cd player out. my loudness threshold collapses before i lose the quality of the sound in cd mode. but when i put my fuze through my cd player in my car i lose music integrity before i come anywhere near the desired decibel.
oftenfacetious,
To add to qualityaudio’s excellent reply:
So you have another person’s experience, here’s mine. First off, my Fuze’s volume is set to high in the system settings. If I connect the Fuze’s headphone out to the aux line in of my amplifier, I have to crank the volume on the Fuze to max to get reasonable volume out of the amplifier. The same thing happens when I connect the Fuze to my car’s FM transmitter. The audio does not seem to distort in either case. But, as we all know, this is very dangerous if folks forget to crank the volume on the Fuze down, insert earbuds (IEMs) into their ears and then plug the earphones into the Fuze. We’re talking blown out ear drums here.
Regarding the car’s FM transmitter, even with the Fuze’s volume adjusted to max I have to turn up the volume on the car radio a bit to get the same volume as a regular FM broadcast. Then if I pause the playback, I can hear a slight low level static sound, mainly because of turning up the volume on the car radio. If I set the volume on the car radio to just right for a FM broadcast, then the Fuze music is a bit too soft but I can’t hear the static when I pause the Fuze. I’m using a Monster FM transmitter by the way.
Regarding the line out cable mod that qualityaudio referred to, I read the thread that deals with it and the conclusion I get is that the audio level out from the modified cable is the same as from the headphone jack with the volume cranked all the way up. So the advantage of the cable mod appears to be not having to crank the volume on the Fuze all the way up and supposedly slightly better audio quality (which I know I won’t hear). There is no advantage as far as the “audio level” to an amplifier or FM transmitter. (Gurus, if I’m wrong here, please chime in.)
CONCLUSION:
My conclusion from all of this is that I’m going to adjust the level of all of the mp3 files that I load into the Fuze to the maximum level just prior to clipping. Normally I set my audio levels to an average level of -12 db for all my audio. At -12 db, the peaks are well below the zero db clipping level. This is an industry standard that I learned when I used to do wedding and slide show productions professionally. But for the Fuze, I don’t think it’s enough for connecting to line inputs on amplifiers and FM transmitters. It won’t negate having to crank the volume on the Fuze all the way up when connecting to line-in inputs but it should help sufficiently for higher levels into those devices.
Thanks for your post which led to my research and conclusion for line-in connections,
Sky (A new Fuze owner)
