Per collection thread

Thanks waraba !

Thanks deadman42 !

I am just sucking at trying to mix distorted guitars and voice currently

Well that’s reasonable as that’s where I shut up and just play guitar Monkey_Man !

That’s odd BayouTexan . Is anyone else getting that? There’s a distorted bassline which is using the same profile as the guitar once things kick in, but here everything is where it should be on studio monitors, headphones, crapmac(Tm) speakers and a more recent iPad.

You’re using active speakers right? Do you still hear it if you turn up the speaker amp on the speaker itself and turn down the interface volume?

Audio streams these days are often floating point and can peak at much hotter than 0dB, there's a lot of headroom.

If you max out the volume on your computer then you basically hit unity, so depending on the sound card setup anything over 0db (or +/-1.0 float value) may be clipped before it ever leaves the computer.

Now if it doesn't clip there it can still clip later on. If the signal coming from the computer is too hot it will actually overdrive the amp circuit of your speakers. The sound can be distorted well before you hear it too, giving you a false impression of the frequency response and cohesion of the music you're listening to.

Finally if you have both the speaker at max and the computer at max it can distort there.

Your ideal setup should be to have your speakers as loud as they will go before the noise floor (hiss from just being turned on) becomes annoying. Usually that's a little way above 5, but it can be higher or lower depending on the speaker volume, amp components and circuit design, cabling etc. Then control the actual volume from your interface/computer with an ideally pretty darn quiet signal.

If you find you're competing with the noise floor then you need to turn down the speakers and up the interface, but generally you should have a heck of a lot of headroom allowing very quiet levels out of the computer.

There's another advantage to doing this, the interface or computer is usually where you are and it gives you a single volume control, whereas on speakers you have to go and adjust each separately which is a PITA and might not even be convenient if you've mounted them.

Thanks Monkey_Man !

Sounds about right. The advice I’ve since seen has been - set your interface output to -20db (or around 90%) with some pink noise. Now push your speakers up a little louder than you want them to be at max, or to where they start to distort then roll them back slightly. Then leave the speaker volumes there forever and always change volume at the computer/interface.

Thanks deadman42 !