It may sound a little bit dumb but yeah, when I turn up the volume of my computer the sound is stronger, louder, but the same happens if I turn up the gain, so what’s the difference?
In: 8
Gain is what goes in, volume is what comes out. Think of gain as the water main going into your house, and volume as the tap on your sink. If you close the valve from the water main too much, it doesn’t matter how much you open your tap, you’re not going to have much coming out of there, and what does come out is going to sputter because there’s air in the lines. But if you have too much water pressure coming in from the main, it could do damage to your plumbing.
Similarly, with gain, you need to make sure that gain is turned up sufficiently high as to get a good amount of signal to work with. If you have too little gain, then you’re going to have to crank the volume and you’re going to get a low quality result because it introduces noise. But if you turn your gain up too high, it’s going to clip (have more signal than your machine can handle) and sound like absolute crap.
I’m sure that someone with better understanding of amplification, gain staging, and signal to noise ratio will yell at me for this imperfect analogy, but hey, it’s ELI5.
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