Volume control - digital output

[R23A]

I am trying to understand how volume control is working in this intended setup:

Audio files are stored on Android tablet (FLAC 24bit/96k, 16bit/44k, mp3 and more) and to maintain quality I want to let my reasonable decent receiver do the data processing. I want no transcoding, compression or other interference on the way. To this end I have set up a Google Cast Audio, which has direct spdif/toslink output, that I feed to the receiver.

This works, but I do not understand how the volume level is controllable on the tablet with fixed volume level set on the receiver. Does it mean that MMA is anyway "messing with my digital stream"? Meaning that e.g. the flac files are not untouched from source to decoding in receiver.

Anyone knows?

The files are actually stored on a Synology NAS, and ideally they remained there while MMA would be the front-end "jukebox" interface only having the task of showing music lists, album art, etc and controlling the streaming. Haven't been able to set that up, though.

[Peke]

Hi,
MMA do not have own Volume control so you use Device one. The perfect behavior would be that Volume control just lowers output gain and do not influence Audio, but that is actually dependent on device manufacturer.

As for TOSLINK/SPDIF in my personal opinion it should parse non changed Audio stream to Chromecast and volume control should not work on device and stream should be sent to receiver at 100% volume, which means end receiver would control output volume or in worst case device will only control stream volume gain where end receiver can be put to 100% and receive Audio stream at level set by send device.

I personally have setup and server that streams plain file network URI so end device do the decoding and playback.

Chromecast should be capable of playback FLAC files of up to 24/96 https://support.google.com/chromecast/a ... 7?hl=en-CA but that again depend on Implementation.

I had mixed results in my own testing, but I made it stable ATM with significant wired and WiFi infrastructure upgrade and investment.

EDIT: As for NAS ideal solution is that your NAS only serve just files shared on Network and destination devices determine how to handle it. Unfortunately MMA still do not handle/access network shares, but we hope we can add it in future.