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Yamaha LS9 input gain
Frederik Rosenkjær:
Geoff Doane wrote on Wed, 16 February 2011 02:41
here's my routine.
Well, just wanted to chime in and say how much that goes against my personal preferences and way of working. Plus I think it's as close to "objectively wrong" as you can get in the audio business (where it's "if it sounds good - it is good".)
IMO the purpose of the gain pot is to optimize the signal for the entire signal path - using it to it's fullest so as to not pickup noise, but without distorting, of course. This applies to both analog and digital consoles.
I'm running an LS9-based rig, though I'm normally using Riedel Rocknet preamps. These have less noise than the Yamaha AD8HR I used to use for inputs which, in turn, have less noise than the native LS9 inputs.
But even with these quite nice preamps I find a dramatic difference when using this approach (all faders @ unity) versus my own approach which is in principle to get the signal as hot as possible - in practice channels are regularly peaking around -6 dBFS.
I mostly operate the rig myself, but every so often I get hired to provide for a band with own engineer and on occasion the BE has been of the "faders @ unity"-school. I hate it - the rig gets so incredibly noisy, as mentioned even with very good preamps and going digitally all the way into d&b D12 amps feeding Q7-cabs, while running the gains my way, the system is just gorgeously "digital black" kind of dead quiet between songs which, at some gigs, is invaluable in my personal opinion and taste. I want to hear the music - not the system.
I've never heard an LS9 distort in any unpleasant way at anything below 0 dBFS. Neither with internal preamps nor AD8HR or Rocknet.
If you want the fader resolution from the 0dB-method, you should consider using the attenuator in the EQ instead of the gain pot.
Also, I have a pet theory that says that this could be the reason so many people dislike the LS9 inputs so much - maybe they should just run them a little hotter.
Michael Lewis:
cool.. I was also thinking of the attenuator in the EQ to bring back faders to unity
Corne Stapelberg:
Hallo Geoff
Thx for your input.
I found the reason for my distortion.
It was infact the DI that clippped.
After I started to use a pad on them as a standard procedure - nothing like that ever happened since I started this post.
From there I run the LS9 sometimes a bit hot, but NO MORE FUNNY NOISES !!!!!
I also follow your way of mixing : Best possible input gain without clipping (with the correct EQ applied) and ANY posistion for the slider
Regards
Corne'
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