Zoom R16 Monitoring

[C. Lynne]

Howdy. Any help on explaining the Mixer Faders (for playback/monitoring) on the Zoom R16 ? When I open New Project with the R16's Defaults everything is plenty loud in my Headphones. Checking where the Fader Levels are Digitally for the Tracks they are all set to 100. When I go to use the physical fader up n down, the sound goes away as i "open" / push fader lvl up ... until it gets around the 0db level toward top of fader. Then it seems I only have a small amount of headroom to mess with volumes and at the top of the fader above 0 db = sounds crappy when monitoring. Am trying to get a comfortable monitor mix to add Vox to my music tracks.

Just confused as to how the Faders work in regard to the Default Level being set to 100. huh? Thanks for any light shed on this. It's probably simple but am still a "newbie" to working inside Headphones for a good take. Peace CL

 

[TalismanRich]

You are correct, when starting out a project, the monitor volume is at "0" regardless of where the fader is actually sitting. As soon as you touch a fader, the positioning takes over. The same thing happens with my Yamaha AW recorder. If a Scene is loaded, those levels will be set at startup, and then overridden when you start to move the faders. It would be nice if the faders were motorized, so you could see where things were set, but that's only for high dollar stuff. Remember too, the faders control 2 different banks on the R16, 3 on the R24. If you switch to the second bank, there's no way for the fader to be moved to whatever the volume is really set.

I'll pull all faders down, then raise the headphone level up to max, then add volume for the faders if I'm doing dubs on my R24. Its a minor inconvenience. Use the headphone volume and master volume to set the level.

When I first started took a bit to understand that the faders don't affect the recording volume. That's controlled by the trim pot. I made that mistake early on, when I had an highly overdriven line input and pulled down the fader, not realizing it did nothing. Turning down the trim corrected things, and then I set the monitoring volume.