Originally Posted By: bupper
the thing is that most plugins are optimized to produce best results with an input of around -17db & this is the volume you should be looking at hitting them. Proper gain staging will make all of your work sound better


Can you cite a source for that claim?

Doesn't sound right.

Also, just throwing out a dB figure without a reference is meaningless information.

dB must always be referenced to something. Sometimes it can stand alone like that if the reference is the *previous* audio level, but that is not the case here.

I'm going to assume you mean, -17dBFS, the "FS" in this case standing for "Full Scale" reference on the typical digital recording program's VU meter.

The math says: -17dBFS signal translates to a Loudness of approximately 0.307786 of the reference, which in this case is the 0dB mark on the VU.

That's like one third of the VU travel.

That is pretty doggone low and likely wouldn't drive the input of an audio plugin very well, surely they are designed to handle much more input than this.

Don't go with a rule of thumb setting in the case of plugins anyway, for different tracks will have differing amounts of energy as compared to time on them.

Most of the time, I use my ears.

In particular cases where my ears detect anomaly, I might resort to use of good quality Real Time Analyzer software or plugin to see visually what the heck's going on and thus be able to make intelligent correction decisions. For example, if it is found that a detected audio anomaly is happening in a certain frequency band, the analyzer shows the band, inserting an instance of EQ before the effect and tweaking that band can alleviate the problem.


--Mac

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