The noisy truth about your DAW: An ear-opening investigation
Learn how to become a better producer in your own home recording studio >>
Comments on this video
You can comment on this video at YouTube
You can comment on this video at YouTube
Thursday April 20, 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.
Tachy Bunker: 32-bit float has a range of 1,528 dB's. If you were in space, you would hear things louder than 32-bit noise floor 😂
SonicSaviour YouWillNotGetMyName: what is the reason? Internal 64bit processing, I presume?
Emlizardo: You had me at Marianas Trench.
Diego Gutiérrez: Can you make a video about aliasing, saturation and compression? Problems and tips about it?
Paul J: Eric Idle strikes again :)
Jokes aside, excellent series and quite enjoyable presentation !
Mikexception: Volume controll with digital do not involve any very low digital signals but only specified numbers for very low DA output. DA noise exists anyway but is not being recorded, only is each time created from scratch from digital data. so in digital recording at level -135 nowhere is recorded any -135dB by volume electrical signal - it is recorded with full standard voltage. hat is why I am not surprised by conclusions.
Sensation of "sound of silence" may be experienced also in -50dB analog level Because in my case I always or almost always hear sound layer from neighbours in the same block, from street which i very quiet but birds sing, fly, my computer working and my ears ringing. The level of perceived silence s too loud to hear any noise at -50dB which is generaly considered not great for analog.
In the DAW: This was amazing
Herbst: Hey, im here to tell you, yes a video about gain staging would be great! - > in my case, a guitar ; )
Alej: A+ for the james cameron reference. Cheeky bastard 😂
William Palminteri: The test proves nothing about system noise floors.
Obviously your DAW preserves the original 0 dB signal and recalls it.
Try recording a sine wave from an external signal source at -138 dB, then normalize it to 0 dB and we'll see what's what.
Bill P.
Ferocious Mullet: 1 bit = 6.06dB so you're reducing it by 23bit = 139.38dB. Not exactly 139dB you are then adding 139.38dB back giving you an extra 0.76dB which is probably being rounded down to 0.6dB by the display. So the discrepancy is valid, the amount of error being shown is slightly low due to I feel a lack of precision in the scaling on the display. Those bars are only 0.2dB in precision, so it's rounding down to 0.6 not up to 0.8 would be my guess.
dreamscuba: Very interesting topic and experiment. Thanks
Christopher Ward: That was a great demo. I thought the signal would come back with some grunge from the noise floor.
Thorsten Ørts: The wonders of floating-point arithmetic.
bestdisco1979: I seriously don’t get gain staging. Surely you need need enough gain to sufficiently feed your plugin chain , if I try the unity gain thing I don’t seem to have enough and end up with some faders way down low. Where am I going wrong ?
Thomas Shea: very good ---- video on gainstaging would be great
intheblink: I really appreciate your approach! Great work! Analog is great and all and sometimes a little noise is nice, but it can be such a pain to deal with. Thank goodness we have such incredible tools to deal with it these days.
The Noise Floor A/V: Thank you for publishing accurate info
Self-Law: Thanks Paul.