Okay.

So now let's talk a little bit about

volume control circuits, and typically
one uses a electronic device called a
potentiometer.
Here's a picture of a typical
potentiometer.
And all it is, is a a set of wire
windings, a resistor wire in there, with
a wiper.
So it's a resistor.
It's laid out and there's a wiper that
contacts that resistor at various points
along the the, the resistor itself.
So [COUGH] the the input of this circuit
is some kind of time varying voltage that
we'll call a signal.
We'll say a lot more about signals later
on in this course.
But instead of a DC voltage, it could be
a DC voltage or it could be a AC voltage,
like what comes out of a guitar pickup.
And so, that's going to that voltage
[INAUDIBLE] is going to be dropped across
this resistor.
The whole volt, the entire voltage is,
will appear here.
And as I go down the resistor, there's a
smaller segment of this resistor between
the wiper location and ground.
And so as, when, when the I change the
position of the wiper, the voltage at the
output changes.
So if I move the wiper all the way to the
top, I get maximum voltage and so I'll
get maximum volume saying that, let's say
that voltage, then, is amplified and
drives a speaker.
and then, if I turn the knob all the way
to the other direction, I'm tapping off
the minimum amount of resistance and I'm
getting the minimum volume.
Now, that's pretty simple but one thing
that's worth noting a little bit here is
that in audio applications when you're
trying to control a volume of a signal
that you're going to listen to, the, the
potentiometers that are used, are
generally not linear.
They're logarithmic.
And what that means is that as I rotate
the knob from zero to the 100% position,
if it were linear, then it would just
track this straight line.
The resistance would go up in proportion
to the percentage of the knob rotation.
But in a logarithmic potentiometer it
goes up very slowly at first and then the
resistance increases more rapidly as you
get toward the end.

Now this curve, actually, if you're

observing, isn't logarithmic.
This is a exponential curve.
But they they, it, it's, it's referred to
as logarithmic.
[SOUND] so, the question is why do we do
that for volume control?
Well, the reason for that, is that the
human perception of loudness is
logarithmic.
Now, what that means is that to double
the perceived loudness, the sound
pressure level has to increase, not by a
factor of two, but by a factor that's
greater than that.
About a factor of 2.8, which corresponds
to about 9 decibels.
Now, decibels, we're going to be talking
about those in other parts of the course.
[COUGH] But a decibel scale is just a
relative scale.
So you pick a reference voltage, for
example, so dB volts decibels measure of
voltage.
As we pick a reference voltage and then
whatever voltage we're referring to, we
divide that by the reference and then we
take the logarithm to the base 10 and
multiply by 20.
Now you can invert this equation and
solve for V.
So if I have a certain dB Volts value
divide that by 20, raise 10 to that
power.
And then the voltage that corresponds to
that is just V ref times that.
So, this 9 decibels, to give you a
perceived loudness of two times is a very
subjective thing.
This, in fact, it's, if you really stop
to think about it, it doesn't really,
what does it mean when something is twice
as loud as something else?
So if you ask yourself that question and
really ponder it for a while, it really
doesn't make sense.
But it's a curious thing about human
perception that people are more than
happy to say, yeah that's twice as loud
as,as this, or that's twice as loud as
that.
So if you ask people to kind of play the
game and, and tell you when something is
twice as loud, then folks are totally
happy to do that.
And so if you do experiments with a large
number of people and play a number of
different sounds of different loudness
levels, and ask them to sort off classify
them, which ones are, are, how much

louder is this than that.

Is it two times or four times louder?
if you do that, then you find out that
subjectively, people well, generally
consider something that is about a factor
of 2.8 greater sound pressure level to be
about twice as loud.
So, what that means is that the let's say
that I have a potentiometer like the
volume control knob on your amplifier.
if it's set at 1, then if I go from 1 to
a position of 2, I want the voltage to go
up by a factor of 2.8, not 2.
And then if I turn the knob from 2 to 4,
I want it to go up by 2.8 times 2.8,
which is about 7.8.
And if I go from 4 to 8, then it has to
go up another factor of 2.8.
And so the output or the voltage of the
potentiometer as I change the knob
position from zero to 10 the at 2, it's
about 2.8.
At 4, it's about 7.8 and then at 8, it's
about 22.
And of course, we made our potentiometer
go up to 12.
Just, just in case you want it to be
louder yet.
But the thing to remember is that
loudness perception is a subjective
thing.
but our subjective judgement classifies
loudness on a logarithmic scale.
And so, one uses a logarithmic
potentiometer for most audio volume
control circuits.