nessbass said:
Here's a scenario. I am recording a rock band. I try to get a decent level to disk so that nothing clips, but the signals are nice and strong.
There's another *possible* problem there -
Once everything is ITB, if it's going to indeed stay there, a lot of things go out the window to a point.
But it's BEFORE the box that's going to make a drastic difference in the sound quality - Whenever I see
"strong signal that doesn't clip" I think
"as loud as possible without clipping" which is really, really bad form, and depending on the front end, can be quite damaging to the audio.
I've come up with a new rule of thumb - "You're probably tracking too loud."
Okay, maybe not YOU, but wow... Preamps are made to sound best at or under 0dBVU. A lot of people want to "record hot" and literally *overdrive* the preamp (not unlike overdriving a Marshall stack's preamp) to get the signal up into those last few precious bits.
Those last few precious bits are there to get BETTER sound at NORMAL levels. -0dBFS is NOT a "normal" level - Whatever happened to headroom?
I get a lot of projects in from a lot of different types - Hobbyists, professionals and anything in between. Whenever I ask a question or two, it almost always comes up somewhere -
The professionals, with the great sounding mixes, track using their gear the way it was designed - "Oh, somewhere around -20dBFS or so" is the usual tracking level. And around -20dBRMS is around the usual mixing level. This is typical with the mixes that come in here sounding wonderful. The open, airy, clear, focused sounding mixes that have huge headroom and intact dynamics.
No surprise, these are also the mixes that wind up coming out MUCH louder in the end - They can
handle the "abuse" much better than:
The "pinched" and "unfocused" sounding home-brew stuff that's tracked "as hot as possible without clipping" - which is anywhere from maybe 16 to 22dB HOTTER than the preamp is designed to run. That's a *serious* amount of signal to be shoving out of a preamp. There's a lack of focus, added distortion, messed up imaging, a whacked out signal to noise -
The really great sounding home-brewed stuff just so happens to be tracked and mixed the same way as the professionals... They might not even know why. "I was just trying to play it safe" and "I saw something on a forum about not recording hot" are popular replies.
And it really puzzles me still on this... This is "day one of class" stuff. But it seems like a huge percentage of people skipped the first day of class for some reason...