You see 'back in the day' anyone who did 'sound' and especially tape recording would, almost from necessity, have a working knowledge of the electronics involved and the parameters and jargon.
*she
A jack type is no indication of what level it's accepting by design
The problem IMHO is that today, would be recordists have got things arse-upards!
Yup, the semantics is where the secrets are.
You set a mixer to 0db. This means that you aren't attenuating or adding gain. This is called unity.
0dbfs is a signal level, not a fader setting.
0dbVU is line level of the device you are using. Could be +4 or -10, depending on the equipment.
If you don't use, or use the wrong modifier (fs, VU, etc...) for dB, no one will be able to follow what you are saying.
I don't get why one would think balanced is +4 ?
No, I think most of us think that the monitors you bought are junk. There is no reason in the world that the soundcard would put out a signal that a standard monitor wouldn't take. It should be one of the line levels.Do we all agree this is normal because there isn't a standard and buying other active monitors won't matter. And I just have to cut 15 db with a mixing board between the monitors or a pot in a tin?
A jack type is no indication of what level it's accepting by design
I've said it before and I still feel the same way...everyone who wants to record, whatever their goals, should start off with a 4/8-track tape deck and a few mics, a small mixer, maybe a couple of hardware processors...and absolutely nothing "digital".
Then when they have that all figured out...move over to digital...and it's amazing how everything digital just "works" when you approach it with that old-school analog mentality when it comes to gain staging and how certain things work, and what a compressor really does...etc.
It's got noting to do with any analog VS digital crap...rather it's just that analog expects you to do things a certain way, to follow known standards and rules.
Digital rerecording these days at the newb home rec/amateur level is a fucking free-for-all.
To this day, since I still do all my tracking in the analog domain, to tape...etc...I never, ever give levels much of a consideration once I transfer everything to digital, and there is usually minimal need for processing...especially if you approach tracking from the mindset that "this is it"...this is where I have to get my sound.
After that, dumping it all into the DAW is usually without the confusion and concerns....the audio is just there, as it should be, and you then just follow through with whatever you want to do in the digital domain.
YMMV...
I don't get why one would think balanced is +4 ?
I miss Ampex. I used my first piece of Ampex gear about 46 years ago and on the video side went through VR1000, 1200, 2000, AVR1. AVR2 quad recorders and then their badged versions of Beta SP gear,
They also bought a darn good lunch for customers.
They build for whatever the market needs. My Akai disk recorder is 220-volt, yet has a 120-volt plug on it : ) hahah