Main Outs Level

  • Any advantage to setting the Main Outs in a particular way? I only see faint mentions of signal to noise ratios being better. My SPDIF is set to 0db and I’m considering locking the mains to the same. What do live desks usually like to see?

  • Analog input sources like to see actual signal levels of 0dB VU (like going into a console, then to meters on the desk should hover around the „0“ mark).

    If you are metering in the digital domain (like in your DAW or some control panel of your audio interface), this will be -18dB FS.

    Once you‘ve set your output levels to meet one of those values, you‘re good to have the right levels everywhere.

  • Analog input sources like to see actual signal levels of 0dB VU (like going into a console, then to meters on the desk should hover around the „0“ mark)...

    Thanks for the info. I may be in for a world of surprise then, I had been sending to desk nowhere near that level! How will I know if I'm in analog or digital though? I kinda assumed all the mixing desk stuff used now was digital. Also, what is the difference in VU vs FS in your examples given? Sorry, this end of the audio stuff is super new to me.

  • dbVU and dbFS are just different metering scales, where all analog gear uses dbVU and digital gear can be set to different scales. The default is dbFS mostly, but you need to know what scale the metering is set to.


    dbVU = the metering scale we know from cassette tape recorders (remember „VU-meters“?). Set your recording levels so that the meters hover around 0 and all is good. You can go some dB higher „into the red“ where at some time things start to distort gradually. That was easy, right?

    Furthermore, the scale defines that you can go up to +18 dB „above zero“. Not without distortion probably.


    dbFS = „full scale“. This is the digital scale, where 0 is actually the very top ceiling of what can be represented in a digital format. 0.00001 dB higher in lebvel and you are causing nasty digital distortion because the signal goes beyond the level that can be sampled in the given format, for example 16 bit. I personally consider this scale to be absolutely useless, misleading and the root cause for many bad sounding records. All meters in DAWs default to this scale! And people think that going up to „0“ like on their cassette recorders would be the way to go to get the best signal to noise ratio and whatnot.


    But when the dbFS scale was invented, it defined that 0 dbVU is equivalent to -18 dB FS to give you the aforementioned 18 dB of headroom above 0.

    So the corrext level is not 0 but -18.

    Very few people know this, though.


    The world would be a better place if every piece of gear would use the same scale by default: dbVU.


    Here‘s a post that I did a few years ago on gearslutz on this topic:

    https://www.gearslutz.com/boar…hp?p=7948600&postcount=17


    I hope that helps.


    If you list the actual gear (audio interface, mixer, DAW software, ...) you have, I can tell you exactly what to do.

    Edited once, last by RiF: Mixed up VU and FS in one place. Fixed. ().