Does the player's volume controls distort audio?

[dioxholster]

What is prefered, to leave it at max 100% and control from the speakers or lower the players volume to prevent the speaker from distorting the audio itself? I find in MPC having it at near 60% to give less distortion no matter how high i go with speaker's volume relativily but not vice versa.

[Hoser Rob]

Yes, software players can definitely distort volume. However it depends upon the player.

But it'd be quite unlikely that you'd get best results at 60% volume. You may be overdriving a preamp stage or your speakers.

If there's a global setting for mpc-hc volume (I forget, I uninstalled it some time ago) it may be set to max 250% or whatever.

See here for an excellent explanation of how problems can arise (Benchmark makes state of the art audio D/A and A/D converters and, since their stuff is aimed at the pro market, the tech support is really good):

http://www.benchmarkmedia.com/wiki/index.php/Digital_volume_control

I actually use smplayer or, rarely, vlc just for video. For audio it's foobar2000. Despite the clunky interface and Godawful docs it just works. For it I leave the volume at 100% and use the windows global volume control, which works well.