Ryan Garnett wrote on Fri, 24 October 2008 09:58 |
In the digital domain is not everything represented by just a number? (or well a sequence of bits that represent a number). If that's the case, digital clipping occurs when you've reached the "biggest number" that the system allows. So ultimately, just make the "biggest number" even bigger and then you should have ungodly amounts of internal gain before clipping, and then at output time, just attenuate things back down to reasonable analog output levels. I suppose this would cost more, as instead of having say a 16 bit or 24 bit signal path, you might now need 32 bit and the components and such would be more expensive...but at least you'd have gobs of headroom right?
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It took me a while to find what post you were responding to..
Yes, inside the digital domain you can add more bits with each extra bit doubling the dynamic range, or use floating point math where you have a fixed resolution and scale that up or down for near infinite headroom.
More useful for real time live use to apply limiting or clip at the point of overload, relative to full scale.
It is appropriate and useful to build in some digital headroom for processes that need it, but in some ways this problem is the same as in analog consoles. You headroom is ultimately defined by the output. While I guess you can always do worse than that.
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In response to Bennet's specific complaint.. I see two possible mitigations. If there are some extra artifacts being generated beyond simple clipping, Some effects can have have math headroom issues. it seems software tweaks should be able to improve that.
Regarding the problem of having to page through multiple layers to find the offending control, one idea I had a long time ago was to have the control surface snap to the channel or layer when it detects audibly significant overload. This feature might be distracting to some, so should be user optional. I never ended up pursuing that project so there may be practical problems with just adding this to a finished hardware implementation.
One very powerful benefit about operating in the digital domain is the ability to incorporate nonlinear decision making to help us much slower humans.
JR