Hey Dave!
Thank you for your technical insight! (And thank all of you for yours!) I appreciate it. Unfortunately... (drum roll)... I have more questions. lol
"0dB" is just an arbitrary number - it is meaningless and has no relationship to the output volume of your speakers or how much wattage your receiver or amplifier is producing."
My impression of the volume knob control system is that they try to make it smooth and predictable, roughly correlating to 1db change per "tick" of the knob. It seems to me that, given a certain impedance profile, they (engineers) should be able to roughly predict how much electricity can be delivered to each speaker at each "tick" of the volume knob. Is this not possible?
And, since the sources are decoded inside the AVR itself, this would seem to give us even more predictability.