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It may even make me buy Pro-L
Very good videos. If you liked these, check out the “Are you listening?” series that Izotope also did.
Dan Worrall’s videos are so good, check out his personal channel too, tons of useful info!
https://youtube.com/c/DanWorrall
Somewhat of a tangent, but the sample rates video has been one of the more eye opening to me
slightly obsolete video, given that there is so much content on this, a click baity video in true sense
good thing though, i never noticed the stats for nerds YT section before , looks like its going to be one of my most used features
TB Barricade is also worthy a look, I'm not saying it will 'replace' the other...
I found this interesting, even for a tech dunce like me. I’ve gradually increased the volume of my recordings, assiduously avoiding any red on the Cubasis meters. But lately I am tempted to let the momentary red indicator go asi am not hearing any audible clipping. Should I do that?
I also ignore the continuous red I get when recording a drum track (mostly from Lumbeats). Just doesn’t seem to matter. Why is that? I’m guessing @wim will have these easy answers.
It’s ironic that FabFilter’s secret in the end is manual increase or decrease of the volume
I do wish Cubasis had more accurate metering tools without having to resort to using 3rd party metering plug-ins.
Since a 'clip' can happen at any frequency a single peak-meter is next to useless so I tend to use the ears, as long as it sounds good it's most likely good.
Regarding 'Loudness', this could potentially trigger some but it's still worth a listen...
DJs Want Loud Masters...
It‘s all a matter of threshold or rather where the red indicator starts to get activated.
That value may be as low as -6dB/fs (which means 50% lower than full scale), but -3db, -2dB or whatever below 0db/fs will light up the indicator... as a warning. It‘s depending on the developer‘s choice.
But as long as the signal doesn‘t cross the zero dB/fs line there will be no audible effect at all, as there isn‘t any clipping happening.
Once zero dB are crossed, you‘ll surely hear it
One can argue that with most tools available these days, you have the comfort of infinite headroom internally - meaning a little (or even more substantial) red won’t hurt.
I think as general practice it’s always best to avoid any red. Not because your tools can’t handle it without audible signal degradation, they will in almost all cases... but because of proper gain staging, just so you’re always aware of how hot your signals at any point of your chain. Also for those relying on presets heavily... those presets were designed with a certain gain range in mind, and they can sound drastically different when hot vs soft signal reaches them.
Another thing is that these signal degradations are not at all easy to spot. In fact most setups are simply not suitable to make these decisions even if you know more or less what to do / where to focus.
If you’re looking at individual channels the red doesn’t really matter, because internally the mixer is 32 bit so there will be no audible clipping.
The only meter that really matters is the master bus, any clipping there will be audible.
The standard practice is to put a limiter on the master to prevent clipping. The ideal workflow IMO is to use a limiter with LUFS metering on the master bus and target the loudness to your desired value and sound.
^this. @richardyot is spot-on. The only place where clipping will happen is on the master. The only exception to this is if you have FX on the channel and those FX are of a type that will clip or distort if driven too hard. In that case, the signal coming in to the FX plugin should be watched.
The idea that individual channels will clip if driven into the red is left-over from the days of hardware analog mixing desks where every channel did matter. (And also from the really old days of digital where 16-bit integer math may have been used)
[edit - there may be some DAWs that purposely try to add "character" to emulate classic mixing desks by introducing saturation. Maybe Harrison Mixbus? I don't know of any on iOS though.]
Just to add some counterpoint, while I agree you can drive individual channels into the red with no issues usually, it’s just bad audio engineering practice to let things get that far IMVHO. Being aware of your signal levels and managing those appropriately will help you in a lot of other situations later down the road. So I’d get in the habit of trying to keep your gain staging reasonable, and try to avoid driving even individual channels into the red if you can. It’s one of the few rules about audio engineering I think people should do their best to follow at all times. Then you’re never left wondering if individual plug ins are clipping, or any other issues outside your control are affecting your signal path unintentionally.
And honestly, it’s not that hard to do either.
Agreed. There is no reason to go into the red in digital.
Ah the good old days ...... analog redzone .....
It does help in managing final mixes, among other things, to keep things in the same ballpark.
I generally like to adjust the internal volume of plugins first so that they have reasonably consistent peaks near zero dB, then to rely on the mixer faders to adjust relative levels between tracks. This avoids having a fader that is way low even though maybe that channel is still one of the loudest in the mix. Or a fader pushed way up that is actually quiet in the mix. It feels much better in my mind when faders generally look like the relative output levels they represent. If that makes any sense.
Also, there are plenty of FX plugins one might use that are affected by high levels. It can be difficult to trace back to what is causing an unwanted effect in a larger mix.
There are plenty of good reasons to manage gain-staging. However, it helps to be doing it for the right reasons, and reasons one understands, rather than for no longer relevant reasons.
Wanting the faders to match the audio at first makes total sense, that's important to me too. When I get mixdowns from clients one of the first things I do is normalize all the audio files to -1dBFS. Then I import them into my DAW and drop all faders by -10dBFS and start the rough mix from there. Just a buffer, no reason -10 versus -12dBFS (or any other value) really.
That's definitely one of the nice things about digital audio files and most DAWs, since most favor peak/RMS metering it's not too hard to tie the actual audio data to the mixdown visually with the faders.
Isn’t it standard for insert plugins to be pre-fader? So that fader levels have no effect on how the plugin reacts?
If I mix in Auria for example moving the fader up and down has zero effect on how hard a saturation plugin is being driven on an individual channel. It just affects the volume of that channel.
Aux sends are a different matter, since they’re usually set post-fader, so that reducing the fader level will also affect the send level.
My personal mix approach is the start with all fader levels at 0db and send each channel to a group: one for drums, one for bass, one for music, and one for vocals. I then lower the groups to -10db and adjust from there. This does send some individual channels into the red but I don’t think there is any technical reason to worry about that. I’ve never heard any distortion or had any problems as a result of this workflow.
That’s another reason I prefer to “pseudo” normalize levels within the input source or plugin before messing with faders. Input levels can be important with many plugins.
This is a good piece of advice. Plus plugins more often than not raise the track’s volume by default, because you know, louder sounds better. So it’s good practice to A/B bypassing the plugin be it saturation, compressors, tape, etc… so that the effect doesn’t mess too much with the actual volume, even if the perceived loudness is changed. Zenbeats has a very handy input/output gain for plugins.
I actually don’t know if @wim comment is line with this or the complete opposite, as in setting the tracks volume via the plugin. For desktop I made extensive use of the gain plugin at the end of the signal as a means of achieving what Wim points out.
Here are some
The thing that’s often forgotten in these loudness wars commentaries, is that there’s a huge difference in mastering a dance track for vinyl and mastering for the streaming services. Mastering dub, funk, disco, house, techno etc is a whole other artform. It’s great if you have the budget to master for both club and streaming services but when push goes to shove in a world where you’re budgeting off of a 500 pressing, the budget usually swings in favour of the vinyl master. And there, loudness and low end warmth matters.
There's really no reason to mastering for streaming platforms anymore sadly, just make it sound good and let the platforms manage loudness the way they want.