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Old 28th July 2008   #22
Dean Roddey
Gear Guru
 
Join Date: May 2008
Location: Mountain View, CA
Posts: 10,907

Quote:
Another advantage I see in recording so that your faders are at or around unity: that's where they have their best resolution.
That's true with some DAWS, like ProTools. But if you are using a more modern DAW like SONAR with a floating point summing engine, it's really not. Since you have a practically infinite number of steps between 0dB and the noise floor in a floating point engine, there's no real loss of resolution when you bring down the faders. So you'd get exactly the same results with the fader at 0dB and record the track so it comes in at -18dB as you would recording it so that it peaks at -6dB and bring the fader down to -12dB.

And, in the meantime if you record at the -6dB peak, you can get optimal gain staging on the analog input chain for the best quality analog signal, and you get a good signal level for later use in the DAW. If you end up needing the bits, you have them. If you don't, you can throw some away with no loss of quality or resolution.

So I just don't see any technical or aesthetic reason why you'd want or need to do this unless you are using a limited summing engine like ProTools.
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