Question for People Who Record

[uOpt]

Re: Question for People Who Record

On the other hand, in my opinion, overloaded magnetic tape is fundamental to the recorded sound of rock 'n' roll music. From Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry and Link Wray through The Stooges and up to The White Stripes, deliberately overloaded tape is part of the overall illusion of extreme loudness.

Which is, BTW, the reason why "exciters" were invented for audio processing.

It's like mastering but instead of band-oriented compression use clipping.

 

[AudioWonderland]

Re: Question for People Who Record

Digital recording needs to be approached in a similar manner to cording to tape.
Thus you need to get as good a signal as possible without it going into the red.
I usually hit a big E chord to set levels to.
The difference between tape and digital is that you really don't want to actually go into the red under any circumstances as digital clipping sounds horrid.

With 24 bit recording I set peaks in the -10 to -15. You have to remember that -18 on the DAW meter is ~ equivilant to 0 on VU meter on the analog ear meter in most cases. you really have to check the specs on the specific gear to really know for certain.

Recording at the much lower levels that 24 bit allows leaves more than adequate dynamic range while leaving headroom for signal processing done in the daw and the occasional intersample peak that most DAW meters won't catch

 

[DrNewcenstein]

Re: Question for People Who Record

Digital audio is completely unforgiving of overloaded signals but some recording software such as Adobe Audition permits editing on a sample-by-sample basis.

EXAMPLE: On the Led Zeppelin boxed CD set with the crop circle cover, the song, "The Ocean" is riddled with digital clipping artefacts. I have seen Adobe Audition used to zoom right in on the clipped samples and manually "correct" them out of existence.

I've got that box - compare When the Levee Breaks on cd to the vinyl/cassette - the intro harmonica gets really loud on the analog versions and gets a nice rich overdriven tone, but that was "fixed" for the cd.

 

[Bravohalo]

Re: Question for People Who Record

Generally, I believe it's best to have the level as close to clipping as possible with occasional peaks over the line in the analog chain with a large buffer on the digital side. Every thing I have ever read on and experienced with analog levels says the first part. In my digital experience, if I run the board levels over -15 peak i get massive digital clipping. Remember that level changes do not affect the signal's eq curve, gain structure, etc. in lossless formats like .WAV, so normalizing and boosting in a digital post situation can make up quite a bit of ground.

Nowadays, software designers are busting their butts to design pristine 64-bit digital emulations of vague, unfaithful, unreliable analogue recording hardware.

And succeeding. Sooner or later digital will finally retire tubes.

 

[Lazarus1140]

Re: Question for People Who Record

And succeeding. Sooner or later digital will finally retire tubes.

You are undoubtedly correct, but in the eyes of an old timer like me it is blasphemous, sonic masturbation.