Analog vs. Digital summing

[admin]

more good stuff! definitely past the point of worrying about summing and conversion.
does seem to be quiet a bit of people have bought and are buying into.
Thanks Meds!

It's a good read. Some of it is a bit outdated as converters have come along way since then. Bob has publicly stated this on gearslutz against a few questions about the book. I can't remember the specifics but it had something to do with not having to be quite as careful now with the specs as we did back then when converters had a wider margin of error.

[Bitfiend]

good Lord there is a ton of information to learn on this stuff!
so in Pauls' post, is he suggesting to keep the master at or below -6 or all your channels, or both?
and if everything is ITB, and vst's (nearly all of them) have floating points; with out say saturation or overdrive or something are you really going to actually clip? oh and are there freq's we need to worry about more than others than can cause the distortions?

[admin]

What Paul's refers to is plugins that can clip somewhere, like Battery 2. Most newer plugins don't but you have to be careful.

If it's floating then no you don't have to worry. But the idea is that you make up the gain at the final point in the chain, the master. What you don't want is illegal sample levels at various points in the mix. So keeping everything lower helps you not have to worry about this. If you're clipping everywhere, most of it will be floating so it's ok, but there might be a few plugins that don't behave well with these levels. So best not to get in that situation in the first place.

What's interesting is that you might clip a sample to get more level, but now you have created an illegal level that when constructed will be 3-6db higher than what the meters show. So in essence by trying to gain more level by clipping you then have to turn this same sample down later on to avoid overloading the converters when it's reconstructed.

[Bitfiend]

What's interesting is that you might clip a sample to get more level, but now you have created an illegal level that when constructed will be 3-6db higher than what the meters show. So in essence by trying to gain more level by clipping you then have to turn this same sample down later on to avoid overloading the converters when it's reconstructed.

so, common sense would tell me no red on the meters, no clip. But this would be a flawed way of thinking about it, wouldn't it? shouldn't i be checking the over all, i dunno, freq's or analyzing the wave form to check for clipping?

[Bitfiend]

also, won't a good converter catch low level distortions?

[admin]

so, common sense would tell me no red on the meters, no clip. But this would be a flawed way of thinking about it, wouldn't it? shouldn't i be checking the over all, i dunno, freq's or analyzing the wave form to check for clipping?

Well there's two issues here.

One is the meters on a whole don't show you the actual signal level most of the time, unless they are special intersample peak meters (like on Ozone3 or Sonnox Limiter).

Two the only place you generally clip nowadays is at the master buss. Except for some older legacy plugins everything I've been encountering recently is 32bit float, including the DAW mixing envrironment itself (although now some are 64).

Just take a sine tone and run it through anything you're unsure of. Either that or drastically raise the gain on something to say +20db, if it was going to distort then you'd hear it.

But a sine is pretty easy to spot, it goes from a pure wave to obvious harmonics even with just .1db of clipping.

Also note some plugins are obviously made to clip/saturate on purpose, for instance the Ren Compressor from Waves. Just spend a bit of time going through the plugins you regularly use. Then you can mix without wondering.