metering - which meters to use?

Chris Tondreau

Chris Tondreau

Member
Here's something I've never been totally clear on.

I'm using VST 5.1 with a Delta 44 soundcard. When I'm setting my input levels, there is a meter in the soundcard mixer applet, and of course, the input meter in Cubase on my channel. The input meter of the soundcard seems to be a little less "forgiving" of high inputs than VST. The Delta meter will hit red before Cubase does.

My question is this....

Am I correct in assuming that if the soundcard meters go red, then I'm overloading my DA converter and getting distortion?

Am I correct in thinking that if Cubase's meter goes red on the channel that I am recording on, that the DA conversion has already taken place, and therefore don't need to worry about introducing distortion in the recorded track?

Thanks in advance;
Chris


....oh, yeah.... if this is mentioned anywhere in the manual, I don't have a problem with simply being directed to the proper page. I'm prepared to take the same medicine I give out.
 
Hey Chris, I have run into the same quadry myself with my Q-10 meters vs. SX meters. This is the conclusion I have come to:

I make sure that my Q-10 meters don't go into the red. I think that this is where the initial danger of cistortion is the most important. That said, I have recorded tracks where after going back to my Q-10 screen with the peak metering detecting on, I have seen that somewhere along the way I sent my meters over the top, but it still didn't give me any noticable distortion, and no visable clipping in the audio track visually, so the issue is a bit confusing. But in general you don't want your soundcard meters to have clipped from peaking.

The meters in SX don't matter as much because they are simply monitoring signal that is being recorded, but won't have an actual distortion danger because you can go into your mixer panel and move the slider down and it reduces the level of the signal and will take it out of the red.

In conclusion ( :D ) if the signal coming from the soundcard is distorted because you clipped in the soundcard, there is nothing that Cubase can do to help the clipped signal. As long as the signal leaves your soundcard unclipped, then you are in business. So I would advise you to watch your soundcards meters.
 
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