Stupid, Basic Mixing question....

[Cleffer]

I am an engineer at an NBC affiliate and have a couple of questions that you folks are more than qualified to answer. In fact, they are downright basic and stupid, but it's one of those things that hardly ever comes up until something like this happens, or someone disagrees....

We used to have an engineer here that was a major audiophile, in fact he owns his own recording studio and is extremely successful in our area. Before he left, he calibrated all of our audio equiptment, including our main audio board used for newscasts. I'm no audio wizard, but I studied under him and learned a ton of stuff that I currently use now....Jump to present....

We have a new audio operator who knows very little about audio and proper mix levels. I taught him the way I knew how, but other people have told him "Their way" and now he is extremely confused. We use Sony WRT lavs and MDR's for canned music, and that's about it for a newscast....First assume that if there is a "standard", we are accurately calibrated to it, and remove all equiptment and objective error.

Questions..

1. I told him to set the anchor mics so the peak rides at 0db. Other people have been telling him the average should be at 0db. Who is right? It is my understanding that levels above 0db usually indicate one form or another of distortion.....An occasional meter in the red is not a bad thing, but they should never be in the red 50% of the time as saying "0db average" would indicate....

2. Submaster A is used for mics and is much hotter than the Master output. He has been using Submaster A to set his mic level, however, the Master out suffers greatly since it is set considerably lower than the Submaster Vu. How should this situation be treated?? A Submaster or Master adjustment? What about when you add another submaster for instance, (Sub B) a music bed?

Thanks for your time and answers. I greatly appreciate it.

Cleff....

[Skyline609]

i think the answer for number one would easily be have the peak at 0db and not the average. think about it, if the average is at 0 you obviously have some points that are going to be above 0 and below it. so some form of dynamics processing is going to be needed. of course that is in a way a sound distorter. I definitely the more logical way is to have the peak at 0 db, and apply some compression to make the signal sound a little hotter, but the peak should still be limited to 0.

[regebro]

Originally posted by Cleffer
I told him to set the anchor mics so the peak rides at 0db. Other people have been telling him the average should be at 0db. Who is right?

Depends. If you are using a peak level meter, he is right. If you use an averaging meter, like most VU's (with a needle), then you are right.

It is my understanding that levels above 0db usually indicate one form or another of distortion.....

Nope, there are usually several dBs in headroom.

[Cleffer]

Thaks for your help. They are average Vu meters, and our Chief Engineer finally got involved and straightend the mess out as I explained to him the numerous different sources of differing information he was getting.

After reading the responses here I did some testing and found out our distortion levels and meter preferences, and found the fact that it is set for peak 0db.

Again, big props to the folks who responded....

Cleff....