Well then congratulations you have missed the whole point of this thread plus misunderstood some very basic concepts on how modern DAWs work.

So, I get a dub-style delay pushed into the range where its peak limiter is useless - that's going to be so much fun with a little filter resonance and feedback. That's marvellous. Where do I sign up for this great new mixing technique?

I'm curious: what happens when you engage overdrive in your tests in Liquid Delay? On Mac, its behaviour is, shall we say, a little counterintuitive at +36dB and certainly not what you get at -18db, 0dB or even +24dB.

...right...

I'll only add this:

While the topic is interesting and again it is full of ego trippers one need to know that:

True music as art was never EVER created under so utterly complicated and almost laboratory condition(such as this stupid gain staging with plugins, or looking under spectogram to find does you plugin alias under "cricket frequencies music") Never!


Ask any of your favor producer. Be it tarnce, trance, dubstep, techno, rock or dead metal whatsoever. Whatever!

Noone ever cared for such stupid thing. I mean they did pain attention to basics of mixing and that' it. You can learn that on the friggin internet. Some people wanted it to look like art of mystery but it is not. Especially with today wonderful tools.


All you have to know is: if it is sounding good to you then it's all good. So simple.

Distorted or not, overcompressed or not if it is matching your own idea and your own sensibilites you should not care how the heck you achieved it. As long as it is sounding good to you. Creative process right?

If you can't hear it (aliasing hunters, intersample peaking, proper gain staging...proper?? whatever) don't bother with it.

It is beyond my mind why would anyone turn something as fun as creating music with your favorite tools (be it hardware or plugs) to something like wasting 15 minutes for every single channel inside your mix to make it "proper" by some dude from internet forum ??




Edit: i think i know new slogan for super uber duper online mastering company:

We care for your music. We are doing proper gain staging

True, but Pink Floyd and Hendrix had technical guys that took care of that for them. Even if they didn't bands like Boston and Steeley Dan were especially technical people in studio.




Again I agree, but to say "noone ever cared for such a stupid thing" is wrong. I guess my favorite producers cared about that more then your favorite producers.




I Agree, then when your done take it to a proffesional.



Sure if your doing it for fun. If I created something that I'm proud of, I am sure going to the extra process to make sure it's represented to the fullest. That's why music should be made by musicians and let the engineers do their jobs. And for the few that can do both that study and practice hard. I don't think you realize that some of the best producers and musicians in history are they way they are because they spent years looking under the hood!

Ok. Riddle me this then.

Why would this be the case if you gain stage "correctly" ? It doesn't decrease the dynamic range one bit.

My final take on this whole issue, courtesy of Chris Rock:

"Yeah, you could do it, but that don't mean it's to be done! S**t, you can drive a car with your feet if you want to, that don't make it a good f*****g idea!"

Xenobt

You are missing my point. "Fun" was merely try to describe creative process. And i am all for learning. In fact i completely agree with what you said.

All i want to point out is that with this stupid thing (last year it was outboard mixing console emulation) NOT A SINGLE track of your will make you successful or legendary or wherever you want to fit in. It's the idea behind your music which will eventually going to be recognized and which will make you famous. Sure technology is important but you know sometimes you are trying to ride wrong pony.


Gain (gang) staging seems to me like a dead pony(to some degree ).

That's it,

Clipping aside, gain staging is nice for a certain consistency of feel with level dependent stuff in the signal path. It's nice when knob settings correlate across instances. I think GUI meters are quite important here as well, nuances matter - love the meter on Cytomic's Glue, for example.

i wouldn't trust everything big studio guys have to say on the matter if i were you. i remember reading a few articles by John Vestman. that was a very entertaining read.

The whole reason it even got to this was that a bunch of people starting saying that you "should" worry about digital gain-staging (beyond some aesthetic or work-flow or whatever approach concern which was not what this thread was ever about anyway) when using a floating point system beyond (duh) the plugins that have level-dependent saturation/harmonics/whatever. This is called misinformation. You know what happens when someone starts to act a little authoritative and bolsters up some B.S. that's totally not actually close to being true even if it's a technical point? People latch onto that sh*t and pretty soon it becomes unf**king possible to kill.

This is what's effectively happened with arguments on the "sound of different DAWs" which is itself a massive clusterf**k of uninformed professionals stoking the fire of obnoxiousness with fuel being added by novices who then fool themselves into thinking they hear something. I think we can all agree that such really absurd abuse of actual reliable information based in reality should be quashed as quickly as possible.

So of course when like 3 people jump in with their little arguments that "floating point suxors and digital gain-stage your way to success" I was pretty much over it and decided to prove that NO, it's not.

Do I care that's it's some uber technical point? Well, how about this logic - would you like an entire generation of mix engineers spouting technical bullshit inside magazines/interviews/where-ever else because no-one bothered to put their foot down and correct them? Think about that for a second.

For one, I don't care about ego. I make $13 an hour at a relatively shitty job that is going nowhere. There. You happy? Now what I do care about is when people are WRONG and then continue to like gloat or some shit in the total WRONGNESS and it gets really f**king obnoxious. THAT is what I can't stand. Which really has nothing to do with ego and everything to do with standing against TOTAL BULLSHIT. So if you could all just get your facts straight and stop pretending about this stuff it would be really great and we could all just have a happy time here.

dude, it's always been like that with everything. idiots leading the morons. that's called "life".

just thank god or whatever you're not dealing with guitarists.

Just felt you deserved a +1 on this. I skipped through this thread and some of the ignorance and ego is mind-blowingly stupid, but also to be expected I guess. Your post summarises it well, so here's me showing support.

Someone mentioned it being similar to religion earlier, and I kind of agree. Until people start questioning blind beliefs that they hold, and do some research to find out the truth, it's not going to change. That just seems to be a cultural retardation at the moment. I encountered this exact attitude in one of my first threads here, just because I questioned a wildly held methodology. Even though I provided evidence to back up my own methods, I've still been met with hostility.

What are you trying to pull off here?
Sorry, but you're clearly barking up the wrong tree.

The argumentation where I posted this was with qa2pir while he was looking for a proper argument "for" leaving headroom. Now... using a proper gain staging process and a calibrated environment automatically means that you leave headroom or have to leave the same regardless. It's part of the process anyway.

What then happens is what you quoted and seem to not understand. I never said anything about decreasing the dynamic range. To some it feels like that, especially if you work in the hotspots (0VU = -18dB RMS to -9dBFS digital peak maximum) but in reality it's the other way around if you mix properly.

Heck, we are still talking about ADC/DAC with 24bit! 144dB of dynamic range (peaks!) available, depending on your ADC/DAC of course. Considering the "noisefloor" (footroom) and a healthy headroom to work with (9dB according to the SMPTE recommendation for QPPM), you still have a dynamic range of 100dB!


So where is your point other than to show off?
Or can you hear down to -120dBFS? I'm pretty sure it's end of the line at -90dBFS if not sooner. And everything louder than 86dB is ear damaging anyway.

So where do you try to aim at?




It doesn't come from nowhere and fired up several times now:
The Reason Most ITB mixes don't Sound as good as Analog mixes (by Skip Burrows on GearSlutz)

The argumentation here went pretty much the same way, but ultimately the OP in this thread is right on certain things. Especially if you want to use both worlds: analog and digital.

If you work purely ITB, you can(!) ignore all that and go your own way (which was discussed in a worse way on GS as well). But I speak from experience that doing it "wrong" for so long does indeed get you there, but it was also more pain to do so and redoing/fixing things at a later state.

I've been there myself, and I've been there with clients.





This is why people like Ethan Winer exist - and what happens to them? They are being laughed at or are kicked out of audio related webboards.

Have you ever seen his AES panel on YouTube?
http://youtu.be/BYTlN6wjcvQ





Aaah... too late, happens in pretty much every music (software/hardware) related magazine I know and read. What's written in there is not even funny anymore.





If you care - my last day-job paid me 6 EUR / hour. I was selling videogames and corresponding hardware to friggin know-it-alls who claimed that a PS3 is ultimately superior than a XB360 (medium wise it's true, else not) and because it's Sony.

I can at least speak from experience in this (audio) topic. I give a funk about 32bit and "overloading" each channel - I know it is possible, but I don't do it - never did it actually except for "young stupid me" (read end-90ies!) that wanted hard clipping drums in very old cheap sounding tunes of mine (glad that they vanished in a HDD crash). I do have 24bit ADC/DAC's anyway (RME!) - so why waste HDD space to record in 32bit if I can't even fully use them, or the output is being truncated once again.

I like the "limitations" of yesteryear, and it pays off. I try to offer this information, for free if I may add, to others that are interested. I don't give much about anything else. If someone wants me to mix his stuff, I do it. If someone asks me to master his material, I do it as well but ask for certain rules before I get the file regardless.


Problem?
I don't see any.


I can agree with kmonkey here:


If you're a musician, give a funk about all that and get your music to the masses. But if you want to be an engineer (which you aren't if you just want to write music!), either learn how to do it right or leave it to the engineers.

This is why we exist after all. We specialise in this (environment), we are there to handle everything "behind the scenes" to make you sound good (subjective!). In reality, you as musician should only care what you can lay down on tape, not how it's (over)done.

ksky pretty much summed it up that even big bands and musicians like Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, U2, Hendrix, Michael Jackson, Elvis, Ray Charles and Johnny Cash started with others recording them. Some of them bandmembers dived into engineering at a later state and then "produced" their own band while also doing mistakes that are now common sense (accepted).


Mistakes were done for decades already, from "no engineers" that turned into (respected) "engineers", even if they learned from actual engineers (with their own tics). Yet it is acceptable and now this discussion is not?

Sorry but if you want to bang your heads together like billy goats in the ruttin season - I can recommend you two boards where the egos are larger than in here: GearSlutz and HydrogenAudio!




I'm out of here, fired my fuel.
Obviously the bonfire wasn't beautiful enough - like a with lot of other things, it's subjective after all.

Oh god. I've touched on another one of those religious type issues again...

As usual, I really should go back over all the posts but don't have time so I'm just gonna try to steer this back on track.

My original writeup is here:
http://www.syncretia.com/Ableton/Clipping.html

The writeup accepts the fact that it's possible that some plugins might clip at above 0db but simply warns to make sure that this isn't the case. Again, I just want to point out that if you hear digital clipping, you're going to know about it because it sounds like crap.

But, the real question is: all things being equal (assume we're not even using external plugins for arguments sake), is there really any point to fussing over gain staging? We know that it makes no difference when we're talking about internal routing inside the DAW. But, some people still insist on keeping things in the green. I would like to hear a clearer explanation of why it makes sense to keep things in the green.

If I were to explain it a student for example, what would I tell them? Why shouldn't they just turn the master down?