Limiting Master Bus for a few peaks?

[ecc83]

I very rarely intrude into the 'mixing' section of HR because I have almost never done any. I am however rather confused about some of the content of this thread and disagree totally with one answer.
If there is a track that has gone over 0dBFS then AFAIK you are *****d and you need to either record it again at a lower levels (like neg 20 as we ALL know!) or you might have a 'clip fixer' such as in Sound Forge.

If on the other hand a hot track is causing clipping when mixed with others, turn it down! If that means the mix now does not 'work' (and I am now straying into subjective territory I know FA about!) then the whole mix must drop a few dB AFAICS?

"Analogue circuits in 'budget' interfaces are rubbish and really good ones are hard and expensive to make"
Sorry, total BS IMHO. The 30+yr old NE5532 produces far lower distortion than most capacitor mic pres and less than any active monitor. The later LM4562 op amp is so distortion free that it is difficult to measure even on the best analysers. The NE is cheap as chips and the 4562 not that much more. The 5532 was and is used in a great deal of very 'high end' studio gear.

Mike B I see you have made much the same point as myself but more succinctly!

Dave.

 

[ecc83]

Cool. Continue to toil. One day, the light bulb might turn on......

Bit trite. Do you have any peer reviewed evidence?

Dave.

 

[ecc83]

Do you have any independently generated specs on your prosumer gear that weren't made all glossy by the manufacturer to show a rosey picture of a product that would refute what I say?

Anybody thinking a buss powered USB 4 i\o interface (or anything using a wall wart) is going to deliver the same performance as top end converters used in mastering facilities is lunacy. Comparing Chinese manufactured products using the lowest end components they can get away with to well thought out circuits with expensive components is like comparing a Harbor Freight 12v freebie drill to a 20v DeWalt.

17 years ago, the heavy weights in audio design and manufacturing used to frequent places like this to share their experience and knowledge to help people understand the difference and make more informed purchasing decisions. Most have gone because of the reception and treatment they received.

Are you a politician? You say a lot but don't answer direct questions.

Dave.

 

[ecc83]

Nope, not a politician at all.

YYou could do a simple search on Google asking the question of why my $200 bus powered USB interface is not as good as an apogee converter and get the answers you seek directly from the mouths the people that can speak with authority on it. I have already done that research.

Ah, a typical politician's trick! Shift the goalposts! Now you are talking about superior CONVERTERS. I will agree with you to some degree about that, the top brands tend to have better jitter control, filtering etc but the analogue side is still neither hard or expensive to make virtually transparent.

However the best converters in the world will not matter in the context of this thread. Another political trick is to throw the burden of proof back to the questioner. I do not need to go searching the internet* for this data.YOU are making the claims for these 'snake oil' audio effects it is therefore up to you to come up with valid data.
I get mine from veteran audio stalwart designers like Douglas Self (Cambridge audio, Soundcraft and many other designs) and the top blokes at Sound on Sound and here at HR.

*Because of course we ALL know that source only ever gives us the completely unvarnished! (am I saving up for some $1000 interconnects? No bloody fear!)

Dave.

 

[jamesperrett]

Some of us have done the tests. I know the weak points of the USB interface that I use but A/D conversion isn't one of them. As Dave says, analogue circuitry is pretty transparent these days unless you are talking about the absolute bottom of the market.

 

[mjbphotos]

Nope, not a politician at all.

YYou could do a simple search on Google asking the question of why my $200 bus powered USB interface is not as good as an apogee converter and get the answers you seek directly from the mouths the people that can speak with authority on it. I have already done that research.

Ok, so I pasted that right into my google searchbar..... Here's one of the results from the Gearspace forum in 2016:
Also released in 2003, four years before Duet: the Mbox and Digi 002. You want to talk about a crappy portable interface that was used on a lot of records, it's not the 2007 Duet, it's the 2003 Mbox. Again, basically the same feature set, except it integrated with Pro Tools rather than Logic.

Presonus also beat Apogee to market with FireStudio Mobile in 2006, the FirePod with 8 preamps in 2004, and the Firestation mLAN device in 2002. MOTU and other companies had plenty of mobile interfaces in those years, too.

So Duet and Ensemble revolutionized basically nothing and certainly did not invent this product category. They were priced higher than most of the previous products, introduced no extra features -- and they didn't sound better. Without a dedicated power supply, Duet was always very challenged especially as a preamp device, but the converters and the Ensemble preamps weren't much better.

Apogee impressed many world-class musicians with these products, their high styling to match cool-looking Apple products and decent integration with Logic. They replaced power-supplied chassis with mandatory buss powering and awkward breakout cables. The design goal was that the product would look good in advertisements, but in practice it made them clunkier to use and worse sounding. They never impressed world-class engineers

Like Dave said: it's up to YOU to prove what you claim is true today. You're living 17 years in the past....

 

[rob aylestone]

One of the things I've discovered in the videos I have done on mic comparisons is that the specs are virtually meaningless. The graphs simply pointers and it's so common on the net to see a product criticised for having a roll off at X Hz or a peak at ZHz as if these things are a descriptor of bad over good. Another mic gets praise for it's non-flat frequency response, and those people who make flat measurement mics certainly never get people suggesting using them for their super flat response on instruments.

I'm also very surprised at the wall-wart power supply comments. If you put a collection of wall wart switch mode power supplies on a scope, while many are truly dire with all sorts of HF noise on the DC line, many are virtually DC component only - when they're well designed, which many are nowadays.

Surely it's up to you to prove your point here, because it does appear hugely biased to a train of thought that I don't subscribe to. I've accidentally used many times the wrong sound sources when they're distributed via patch panels. Not once has this ever been signalled by any warning bells, only when somebody powers down a device and the sound continues and you discover you just used a 'lower quality' source. Funniest was when we had two cat 5 lines going to to on stage converters one costing far more than the other and couldn't tell any difference. The absence of noise and especially distortion is enough. In a studio with absolute silence and very capable gear you can make choices, but that difference is so small that in less controlled environments it simply is not discernible.

You are entitled to your opinion, but it means it's up to you to support it, not for us to blindly accept it? Share your research if you wish? Perhaps it will stand up to scrutiny from people who don't have any real bias?

 

[ecc83]

Preamp Post-mortem

When we compared eight mic preamps with very different designs and price tags, we found it hard to tell them apart. Could SOS readers do better?

www.soundonsound.com

That ^ in modern times is probably the closest test we have got of 'budget' and 'high end' audio electronics and the results show people really cannot tell the pre amps apart.

Running properly managed double blind tests that have statistically valid results is a time consuming and expensive exercise and it is no wonder the rich, high end manufacturers don't want to do them. I suspect that they DO do them behind closed doors and don't want the results known!

Dave.