Limiting during remote recording?

[joelpatterson]

I mis-explain myself. I was choosing "130 dB" as a range from absolute silence to absolute deafeningness-- sure, the chatter of the audience and the ambient noise of the Earth rotating means that nothing ever plunges down to 130 dB's below the zero point.

But Ben, when someone puts a CD in the player and the program material is down at -65, don't they have a hard time hearing it?

Or do you mean -65 is the "hush" of stillness in the room?

That was the point I was awkwardly and ineptly groping for-- in my world, when the meter reads -30, that's some pretty "quiet" stuff, that's when the solo flute intro begins the movement.

Anything under that, you're setting up a situation where the audio will disappear under alot of real world playback-ing situations.

Which gets me back in a roundabout way to my take on the whole issue: an engineer will need to compress the "reality" of a vast range of signal levels (130 dB) into the "digestible" CD range of 30 dB or so. Or... am I alone in this methodology?

[Mats H]

No limiter except when on film location with a boom mic

I´ve turned off the limiter on the MR1000 on classical gigs, it just kills the audio. The bigger rig hasn't got limiters and I don't miss them. I set the preamps conservatively and haven't had a clip in maybe 5 years... though I've been close at -0,2 dBFS once or twice.

Slight clipping doesn't cause issues either with my converters and preamps and even though some audio's been clipped, it's often restorable with Izotope RX. It doesn't cause much of a headache. I don't think about it much.

Mats Helgesson
LIVING SOUND

[RickZ]

Shortly after receiving my first MR-1000, I tested the limiter, and found it to be not very musical. I use only the 5.6 DSD setting for recording, and have found 'over's' to be handled very nicely. I use AudioGate to convert to 88.2/32BitFloat for editing, and what appear to be drastic over's edit down just fine. So no need to limit during recording.

But to Joel's point, I too try to reduce the huge dynamic range, so listeners have a chance at listening in their cars, without endless volume control changes. I've found Voxengo Elephant, and Waves L316 very effective in bringing up quieter portions, while holding back the loud parts in a pleasant way.

FWIW,
Rick Z

[Ozpeter]

In pure classical music, I apply a limiter in post-production only to catch what I think of as "accidental peaks" - where the level may have been boosted by acoustic build-up within the room/hall, or where (to take an example in the solo piano world) where the performer whacks a note or chord rather harder than the music actually calls for, for instance in making a rapid movement from one end of the keyboard to the other. I'm not using it in a way that either the performer or the composer or the listener would notice - there's no chance any of those persons would say "what happened to the fortissimo there?" - I'm just making it so that a few such transient peaks don't dictate the normalised level of the whole when they don't merit that function.

Years ago in the final analog days I was actually more of a purist, and once released an uncompressed-level cassette of the organ at Durham Cathedral which included the sound of the cathedral clock very distantly striking in the run-off portion of one side. Seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was of course totally inaudible when compared to the sound of the full organ, to anyone else but me. I recently had the original betamax digital master copied to CD but I'm still not entirely sure that clock bell is there...