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Originally Posted by peeder  Well there are mathematical facts that can't be denied about where your "loss" might be coming from and where it cannot come from. If you print at under 0dbFS (i.e. you are not clipping your converter) then it becomes unlikely for you to overdrive any plugin over 0dbR, where many of them for some stupid reason decide to clip, without applying gain on the plugin chain somewhere. So you were screwing things up with overhot plugin settings if you were clipping them. If you saturated them approaching 0dbR, then that's a facility of the plugin, it is intended to sound "analog" and works precisely as analog does. Most of those plugins have an input trim knob that people studiously ignore for some reason.
You cannot clip the bus of a DAW, nor does the bus have a "sound" despite hue and cry from thousands of misled engineers. The bus in a floating point DAW has 900db of headroom, and in PTHD, many dozens of db of headroom. If you have plugins on the bus, or are rendering to a fixed format at the filesystem or a DAC, then you just pull the master fader down on the bus, and you will not clip or saturate anything you don't want to. No need at all to pull all the little faders down, trim all the channels, normalize, or track at lower levels.
Don't take advice from anyone who doesn't know these very basic and instantly self-verifiable FACTS. Mastering engineers lecturing people how to mix is bad enough. Analog heads who don't think plugins can saturate like analog and don't know that they are doing so is just as bad. People who were overdriving a bus plugin, and solved the problem by tracking at lower levels are hilarious. You could get rid of a hangnail by cutting off your arm too.  |
I dunno,
All I can say is that it sounds much better this way, mixes are effortless, I barely have to touch the faders!
As far as the plug-ins, if the cause is overdriving them, then it's obviously a good solution to track less hot; more headroom for the plugins to breathe.
Anyway, I try not to use plug ins, when I use them it's the UAD eqs and limiters, usually cutting rather than boosting..