Gain staging podcast in Sound On Sound magazine - David Mellor
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Sunday May 21, 2023
David Mellor
David Mellor is CEO and Course Director of Audio Masterclass. David has designed courses in audio education and training since 1986 and is the publisher and principal writer of Adventures In Audio.
Editing SECRETS revealed!: Hooray! Got your podcast coming in here loud and clear. Very enjoyable presentation. I like your starting with vocabulary and history, walking through the process step by step, explaining which traditions are still valuable and which obsolete but still taught or used nonetheless.
Hope you'll have a podcast or video on fixed vs. floating point audio soon.
Before WAV, maybe you put your uncompressed PCM streams into Audio Interchange File Format files on Mac ('88)?
sides up: You are so right about the loudness war cd mentality. Some cds are so loud that they actually overload the amplifier input that the cd player is connected to, besides the cds having compressed bad sound. A particularly bad combination is playing one of these louder than loud cd wonders into the line stage of a vintage amp. The ones from the 1970s or early 1980s before cd came out. Their inputs often are not cd ready with such loud output levels. Fortunately most of my cd collection is from before the loudness wars, and now that I have a near state of the art cd playback, everything bad that I thought about cds is wrong. It was the players themselves adding distortion, brittleness, grain, edginess etc. People would be surprised how very analog like most cds sound when played back on something truly exceptional. The last bad thing overcome? Glare.
sides up replies to sides up: @Audio Masterclass Thanks. That makes sense. My one cd player was the top of the line model, but it must have been before that. My player goes way back, so that explains it. My amp also goes way back and actually a few years before cd.
Audio Masterclass replies to sides up: While I can't comment on your particular equipment, audio on a CD can't go higher than 0 dBFS, no matter how loud it was mastered. So if your amplifier can handle the output from your player at 0 dBFS, which will be present in old CDs, it should be able to handle modern mastering. The exception though is that there will be intersample peaks that go higher than that, which we call the true peak and measure in dBTP. So an older CD player that was designed before there was much awareness of true peaks might clip, and an amplifier that was designed only to handle the maximum expected output of a CD player may also clip. Modern mastering may throw up more intersample peaks so this may be the effect you're hearing. DM