Zoom H1 Essential Gain

[dbsoccer]

While drilling into my recording issues I've been introduced to gain staging. As I've posted elsewhere I'm trying to record a single voice in a simple basement 'studio' using a Zoom H1 Essential recorder. My first attempt last night was terrible. The backing track sounded ok but the vocals were clipping more than you'd find in a 'Pets Smart' store in the spring.

At first I thought it was because of my mixer and maybe having a bad mic channel. But this morning I discovered the manual gain setting on the recorder was at 100%. The mixer has leds, etc to help set the initial mic gain. I think I understand how to do that. But I read where the output (volume) of one stage is the gain of the next stage. And when I get to the 100% setting I had dialed into the Zoom - how do I set this. The Zoom is suppose to have some clever 32 bit floating feature that I understood removed the need for a manual gain function but in a recent firmware release Zoom added ability to set the gain manually. But I've found no explanation on how this is done manually (e.g. no leds like with the mixer) and if I wanted to allow the 32 Bit floating feature take charge, how do I do this - i.e. how do I turn off the manual gain set function.

Thank you for your help!

 

[TalismanRich]

What is your recording chain. You mention using a mixer. Are you doing a line out into the H1E? While 32 bit float audio should never clip, you can probably still overload the input stage. Gain is, after all, just a voltage increase. There is a physical limit on how much a particular preamp can handle.

If you are recording in 32 bit and export to a computer DAW like Reaper does the waveform show any sign of clipping? There should be none. 32 bit float can handle 1500dB of SNR.

194dB is the absolute maximum sound pressure possible in air. It covers just about everything from a gnat fart to a volcano exploding! That level of sound would be lethal. So any overload is either the audio preamp, or you are overloading the output stage with signal.