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In article -nospam writes:

"Mike Rivers" wrote in message
Still it would be nice to have an input level
control on our sound cards.

Depends on the driver/mixer applet that comes with the card.

That's where the "knob" is, but it really depends on the hardware. You
can change the record gain, but this is a digital scaling, so you lose
resolution when you drop it and increase noise (and possibly run out
of analog headroom) if you raise it.

What they need to do if they don't want to put a pot on the box (Echo
used to have one box with real pots, the Mona perhaps?) is to put a
digital attenuator ahead of the A/D converter, and control that with
the sound card mixer applet. The argument that the manufacturers who
have answered to that is that they can't find an attenuator that's
quiet enough, and putting one in would decrease the card's
signal-to-noise ratio.

As for me, I'd rather have the noise increase a couple of dB down at a
level that I can't hear anyway and have a way to control the gain
structure of the system. However the marketing department knows that
people will compare this figure and buy the card for which it's the
lowest. They see this as losing more sales than it would gain, and as
we all know, it's not as much about sound as it is about sales.

--
I'm really Mike Rivers - )