Audio Bussing Question - Signal Loss/Degradation

G

gregoryg

New member
Hey guys, I've noticed that if I have a huge audio bus, >10 channels, the volume of everything in that bus plummets WRT the overall mix. For instance, if I bus all eight of my drums tracks (k-s-lo-ro-hh-rd-rt-ft) to a drum bus for comp/EQ it's fine - no affect on volume in the mix; but, I've found myself having to bus a ton of tracks on occasion (say all guitars and voxes) to try something and it impacts the sound drastically. Everything on that bus drops way out of the mix.

I can see this happening on old outboard gear, as signal is likely lost due to physical routing and rerouting, but in a DAW? Why is this happening?
 
Actually, it doesn't happen on outboard gear or ITB as far as I know. What normally happens is that the level builds up the more inputs you add to a bus, by approximately 3dB per doubling of the number of inputs. The danger is that you can run out of headroom.

Perhaps StudioOne attenuates the signals going into a bus with a lot of inputs to conserve headroom. That seems odd but I suppose it's possible. Are you sure it isn't something like a pan law setting that's causing this?
 
Wow, I had no idea WRT outboard gear, I just assumed more wires = less sound :)

Umm, I'll have to go back in and recreate the problem to see about panning. On the quick and dirty, I went in and opened a session with 20 tracks, grabbed everything and sent it to a bus, and sure enough the volume drops. How would I go about looking into pan law? The bus is stereo, so I'm confused how it would have a sound any different than the master bus.
 
Probably a little too obvious, and I'm not insulting your intelligence. But sometimes the most obvious things are what screw us up.

The volume of the bus fader is at unity, right?
 
RAMI said:
Probably a little too obvious, and I'm not insulting your intelligence. But sometimes the most obvious things are what screw us up.

The volume of the bus fader is at unity, right?
Click to expand...

No insult taken. But yes, fader was the first thing I checked. I even removed the bus, zeroed all tracks, added bus, and still experience the drop out.

However, now I'm thinking, maybe it's not a DAW thing and I MUST have some setting somewhere that's us doing something wonky.

I'll try to put it to a video...
 
i feel you bro, im on cubase 5 and if i send something to a group, to an other, to an other, to an other etc. (you get me) the volume goes down every step, i can't really explain it tho, i try to use less of re-sending that fixes my problem, if you really need to resend your signal maybe try finding the loss of each step and give it back on each of those steps or at the final step
 
Is there a gain control on the buss other than the fader. I have never seen studio one, but cubase/nuendo has one. maybe it defaults to something other than unity.
 
Farview said:
Is there a gain control on the buss other than the fader. I have never seen studio one, but cubase/nuendo has one. maybe it defaults to something other than unity.
Click to expand...

Nope, not seeing any kind of gain or trim beyond the one fader for the buss.
 
Vigo said:
i feel you bro, im on cubase 5 and if i send something to a group, to an other, to an other, to an other etc. (you get me) the volume goes down every step, i can't really explain it tho, i try to use less of re-sending that fixes my problem, if you really need to resend your signal maybe try finding the loss of each step and give it back on each of those steps or at the final step
Click to expand...

Basically the same way I've handled it (minimize re-sends)
 
I think Rami migh have been on to something. The tracks I have bussed are all up in the mix like +3bd (not 0 as I had thought) going into a 0db buss amongs other +/-1db tracks. So I'm thinking this is the problem and solution sitting right in front of my face and one big FACEPALM on my part. Thanks guys! Still gonna keep it open in the back of my mind though in case I re-encounter the problem with 0 going into a 0 buss with signif decreased vol coming out.
 
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