Quote:
Originally Posted by Dean Roddey  I think that everyone would argue that it's bad gain staging to have plugin one pull the level down by 18dB and plugin two push it back up by 18dB, right? From the perspective not of the summing engine, but of the noise introduced by plugins, that's a bad thing still, isn't it? |
In the modern floating-point digital realm, noise and distortion basically don't exist unless a programer takes pains to create them. In 32-bit float, you have 900db of headroom and 150db of dynamic range (no, those aren't typos...digital is odd that way). Clean gain and trim is ubiquitous and also just about unavoidable.
Virtually no plugins introduce noise...some tape sims do, and of course signal generators.
You can overdrive a bus in a floating point DAW by the mentioned 900db, bring the signal back down 1400db, pull it back up 500db and null with what you started with to a full 24bits (144db) of precision. You can do that through some plugins too.
Some plugin makers want plugins to clip at 0dbR (an arbitrary point where the DAW maker flashes a red clip light, not to be confused with the clip lights they flash that aren't arbitrary at a converter or the file system), and if you have one of those in your chain, then it establishes that as an upper limit for consequence-free level. The plugin maker has to purposefully add this clipping behavior and any other saturation behavior; frankly I have no idea why many of them do when it's just going square at 0dbR and I really wish they wouldn't (it may be for legacy compatibility with old fixed point systems like TDM that they did this, feh I say to that
).