Thoughts on loudness meter calibration

[Studio603]

So I have a set of Dorrough 40-A's, and am going to use them in my pro tools system.
I ran them from the main out's of a 002, created a couple of channels and a master fader, and set them all at unity with a 1k tone at -20 on each of the channels and panned them hard L-R to calibrate the meters. When I run a session however, I have to bring my master fader down past halfway to stay in the safe zone on the meters...and I'm concerned that my output level will be low, even though the meters say I'm running at unity (with peaks up to +5 or so). Does this sound like I calibrated the meters correctly? Any thoughts would be welcome!
Dave

[Edward_Vinatea]

Originally Posted by Studio603

So I have a set of Dorrough 40-A's, and am going to use them in my pro tools system.
I ran them from the main out's of a 002, created a couple of channels and a master fader, and set them all at unity with a 1k tone at -20 on each of the channels and panned them hard L-R to calibrate the meters. When I run a session however, I have to bring my master fader down past halfway to stay in the safe zone on the meters...and I'm concerned that my output level will be low, even though the meters say I'm running at unity (with peaks up to +5 or so). Does this sound like I calibrated the meters correctly? Any thoughts would be welcome!
Dave

This unit is designed for analog racks and mixing consoles IMO. Moving your master faders up or down from PT's unity gain is asking for trouble.

[Greg Reierson]

Your calibration is technically correct but culturally behind the times. IOW, your metering is perfect for 1982.

OK, maybe that's too harsh. A better way to say it is that you are doing something that hasn't been seen in the wild in decades - using headroom in your mix. I'm not sure if it's still socially acceptable and you might be blacklisted for it, but if you do attempt to mix that way you will probably make records with much more punch and musicality because your target will not be maximum digital signal level, but rather a good sounding mix. It'll take some courage.

To say it yet another way, what you have done is reintroduced the concept of headroom to your metering. In the old days of analog VU meters, engineers learned to understand what the little needle was doing and glanced at it from time to time to make sure they were within the limitations of the recording medium and then forgot about it. When digital recording became available to the masses, we calibrated our VU meters to read -20dBFS (or -18 depending on who you talked to) to ensure than pretty much anything not completely slamming the VU meters would be WELL within the range of those extra 18 or 20dB of headroom on the digital recorder. Nobody was worried about the volume war. There was still a general consensus that transients were musically important and accidental clipping distortion was a bad thing. That lasted for a while. Everyone knows what happened next...

But that's not really what your asking. If you want your mixes to peak closer to 0dBFS then all you have to do is calibrate the Dorroughs to something closer to 0VU = -14dBFS. I honestly wouldn't go any higher than that. Give the mastering guy some room to work and the end listener something to listen to.

Thanks for listening...


GR