Quote:
Originally Posted by Cellotron  I don't think it has anything to do with the practice generating "positive harmonic distortion" - instead I think that some high peak transients are going by so quick that when the tops are flattened out the resultant square wave is so quick that it doesn't offend the ear as noticeably. Some ADC's have analog front ends which simply have more headroom (resulting in less distortion when pushed) than others. Still - as soon as you're overloading them there will in fact be some form of distortion happening - whether minor or not.
First off is just sensible gain staging - having a healthy but completely undistorted signal level through the entire process chain. With today's equipment this luckily is fairly easy to achieve. Next a lot of ADC's used in mastering have input attentuators on them - for my own setup all I have to do is turn the attenuator on my Mytek Stereo96 up so that the level at the input is going over what would be digital zero at it's output - and voila! - you have clipping at the input. What you have to do is monitor at the output of the ADC (I have a live loop back from my DAW to a seperate DAC so I can do this) and listen to hear at what level things start to noticeably distort so you can set this point properly. Usually clipping at the ADC works best when you're just chopping off the very highest transient peaks.
Best regards,
Steve Berson |
Hi Steve,
Good stuff! I'm demo'ing the UA 2192 this week and one of the things I'm trying is different degrees of harmonic distortion -> clipping from the "colorful" UA front end for mastering projects.
A bit fiddly since it only has the tiny screwdriver-type attenuators round the back. The Mytek Stereo96 seems to be easier to work with in that respect. I also like the small footprint.
Up till now I've worked entirely ITB, but have felt the need for a round trip to analog for reconstruction of the signal. Also to avoid leaning too strongly on digital compressor/limiter for my level.
I saw in another thread that you contemplated exchanging your Mytek96 for the Lavry Blue for ADC back from analog. Do you find the Mytek lacking in any way in this application? How does the Mytek 192 compare? Is the front end identical to the 96? I understand the Mytek 8x96 has a different front end that doesn't work as well for this task.
Regards
Jørn Bonne