Walter Knapp has written, 23 Jan 2005:
> Digital is far less forgiving of going over on your signal.
> Clipping, which is a fairly soft effect in analog tape becomes awful
> noises in digital. You don't want even one wavetop to clip.
> ...
> The first thing you will have to learn is to always
> have a pad in your metering. I usually set for -15dB on the meter,
> though that varies depending on what I'm recording. With 16 bit digital
> you have far more dynamic range than you had with tape, so setting lower
> gain is not a problem. You should never, ever, see the metering hit the
> 0dB mark. In fact since it's not showing every value it should not come
> close.
Advice which I have been following.
But it means that I sometimes finish up with a recording that may be mostly
below -24 dB.
I use Peak LE to copy a digital line out signal from a Tascam DAT to a Audio
Media III Card in a Mac G3 to make an AIFF file, and then Toast to burn a
data CD with a writer that uses TEAC technology. My hope has been that
after the Tascam has made the initial A/D conversion, I am retaining the
original digital data unchanged through to the CD.
Question 1. Is that a justified assumption?
For pleasant listening, a recording below -24dB is too soft. Peak allows me
to increase the gain, and for an audio CD I usually aim to increase the gain
so that the loudest sounds are at about -6dB, with maybe just a few notes
registering -4dB.
Q. 2. Am I right in thinking that the intrinsic noise produced by my field
recording equipment is not totally dependent on the recording level, and
will be relatively worse if I set the R L in the field unnecessarily low?
Q. 3. If I use Peak to increase the gain in the computer AIFF file before
writing a data CD, am I negating my desire to have the digital data of the
sounds unchanged from Tascam to CD?
Q.4. Is is possible to explain in terms understandable to a non-technical
person, what happens to the digital data when I use Peak to change the gain?
I should explain that increasing old-age hearing loss, means that I can no
longer rely on what I hear as a satisfactory quality assessment of sound,
and need to rely on what I cam see on computer screen or recorder dials.
TIA
Syd Curtis in Brisbane, Australia.
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