Alexis…
I think this thread has strayed well into the extreme esoteric and away from the point of your original post (how to maximize playback level).
I’ll offer you the gist of my understanding re…intersample peaks, digital clipping distortion etc…
- Lot’s of complaints in the early days of digital about crap sound quality if digital was overloaded (ie…>0dbfs). Early converters were not nearly as good as todays (which are still not nearly perfect). Subsequent studies came to a view that digital distortion sounds worse than analog because it tends to be odd harmonics whereas analog tends to generate more even harmonics.
Ture/not true??? I couldn’t tell you on the basis of having personally SEEN the scope traces proving it. I’m pretty certain that I’ve heard it myself and am reasonably convinced that it doesn’t sound good. Record at 24 bit’s and keep the levels down well below 0db
- Maximizing playback levels…I certainly dont know all (or even most) of the tricks. this is evidenced by the fact that I’m always wondering why I cant get my own mixes as hot as those on CD’s and radio. I get better with each try and find little things but I have no silver bullet to offer.
Maximizing playback levels…
Careful EQ’ing is my main approach. Most stuff can be eq’d to where it sounds a bit thin on it’s own. Doing this eliminates alot of sonic energy thats un-needed allowing the mix as whole to be turned up a touch higher. Try this, record a tune with drums, bass and piano. Do no eq on them, just mix them to where they sound pretty good. Bring up the stereo bus/track faders until the peaks shown on the main buss reach -0.2 (ie, you know you’re not overdriving but you’r very close to 0db).
Now take the piano track, turn on eq1 (the HPF/shelf eq. Turn down the gain as far as it’s go, adj the Q to get rid of the hump on the curve (in other words, you should see a deep rolloff at the low end rising to 0 with no hump). Now increase the freq on that eq up to around 250-300 hz. You’ll definately hear the bottom end being carved out of the piano but if you un-solo it, the bass and drums and will fill much of that in. Do this and now look at what your stereo bus peaks are.
They’ve probably fallen a good bit below the -0.2 that you had to start with. You can now turn up the track a bit to get the peaks back up to -0.2… you’ll get more perceived volume but still be at the same peak level as before.
You can do this on all the instruments, use EQ to carve out the un-needed frequencies. This reduces the amount of sound (in this case, electrical) energy, reduces the peaks, leaves more space in the mix for other instruments etc…
Lastly, I must admit, I do like plugging something like a Waves L2 or L3 maximizer on the stereo bus. Almost without fail, I find I can compress the very top peaks, have no negative effect on the sound of the song and no real perceptible effect on the dynamics even though I know it MUST be reducing them. But in so doing, I get a significant increase in the playback level without having to push the peaks right up to 0db (ie…I set the peak limiter to -0.2 or so to give enough room for inter-sample peaks etc…).
I’m sure there are other tricks that ME’s use (multiband compression etc…), but I dont know them, or dont know them well enough to explain them.
All the best,
Karl