Which should control the volume?

[djantonng]

I have equipment and all of them have volume controls. At what levels should they be set at, or should the audio interface control the volume?

[scottboyher]

Turn them all to 11. Well, at least that's what I do.

[Doug Quance]

In a signal chain, you want to make sure that each device provides a proper level of signal throughout the chain.

For example, if you do not supply enough gain in the beginning of the chain you may wind up amplifying the signal - and noise - later in the chain.

I would imagine that the rule of thumb is to drive each piece of gear at the level that the next piece of gear wants to "see".

I can remember visiting a friend that had a surround sound system... but it sounded shitty. He had no clue as to why, especially since he spent so much money on it.

I looked at the signal chain, and discovered that his system used the output of the television as the input to the system... and he had the volume low on the television and was making up for the lack of signal in the surround sound system (which introduced a lot of noise).

I turned the volume of the system down - turned the volume of the tv up - and voila... problem solved.

The principle is the same regarding recording gear.

[Fletcher]

It's a delicate balance that goes by several different names: gain staing, gain scaling, etc.

The key word is gain. What you pretty much want to do is to achieve "unity gain" through every piece of hardware in the recording chain.

In a relatively simple chain, you would bring the microphone to the desired level into the recording device, then add a compressor to the output of the mic-pre and add "gain makeup" to compensate for the "gain reduction" that occurs when using a compressor.

The idea being that if a signal isn't hot enough you'll bring up undesired noise artifacts, and if you drive the hardware too hard, you'll distort the amplifiers that comprise the hardware.

As you get more advanced with the process you can make up for certain inadequacies of some of the lesser equipment within your arsenal. Things like cheap mixing consoles don't really have enough of a power supply to properly form a bass tone nor respond to transient signals properly... so if you drive them "colder", you'll be able to tax their power supplies less, which will net you a better overall bass and transient reponse.

Best of luck with it.