Micter said:
Like I've maintained all along you should track high enough to use some of the bit rate available without getting the front end so hot it goes into distortion. I'm not saying track as hot as you can but as hot as you need to to get some resolution.
Your idea is not disasterous, Micter, it's just based on a misunderstanding of what's actually happening. Getting the right level is not a result of how many bits you use, but rather of how hard you are or are not driving the analog side. You get your analog levels wrong and all the digital bits in the world aren't going to help you.
(And BTW, "bit rate" is something else altogether, not the same as "bit depth", which is what we're talking about here.)
Micter said:
There is a huge area of grace when it comes to digital recording and we should know where that is and stay within those boundaries.
The only "boundaries" on the digital side are to not limit the dynamic range of the recording by not using enough bits on the low side and not to clip by running out of bits on the high side. One can be *anywhere in between* and it will not make a difference. There is no advantage in digital tracking to pumping the level up to just below clipping, and there is no disadvantage to dropping the digital level down to the dynamic range of the analog signal it represents. There is otherwise no "sweet spot" for a digital signal.
Again, if you are running you analog in at 0VU or thereabouts, which is the "sweet spot" for analog, it will *by design* convert to about -18dBFS on the digital side with all digital faders set to unity (with a few peaks above that level that correspond to whatever peaks may have risen above 0VU on on the analog side beofe conversion). There is no advantage or need to pumping that up any more than it is when laying it to disc just to "fill in the bits". Those extra bits do nothing but cause the digial mixing engineer to have to lower the track gain that much more, that much faster when mxing multitracks together.
If you track too low on the analog side, then yeah, sure, you're probably comprimising the quality of the signal at which point the digital copy of it will be at low levels. But boosting the digital signal at that point will do nothing but make the lousy analog staging more audible.
This is, in fact,
exactly what you are experiencing when you say
Micter said:
I have gotten tracks that are so low that they just sound horrid when I gain them up.
"Gaining them up" digitally upon play back is no different than "gaining them up digitally" upon recording, neither one helps the track sound better.
The problem with those tracks is not that there were not enough bits used on the digital side of the converter when they were tracked, it's that one or more preamps on the analog side were set too low. Increasing the bit usage would do nothing to correct that.
G.