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I can indeed start to hear hiss if I take a recording that I made perhaps 25 dB down in 16 bit, then boost it up 20 dB. Try that experiment for yourself.



Scott.

The first thing I ask myself is - why would someone with your obvious knowledge and experience want to record anything 25db down?

One thing you must remember is that you have a theoretical dynamic range of your digital recording medium, but an actual one based on the noise floor from the inherent noise in the signal chain. If, for example, you put a cheap mic in front of an old Marshall tube amp, your dynamic range is, I think the technical term is "shot-to-hell". Even just a good mic through an expensive pre-amp will have a noise floor higher than the digital medium. The experienced engineer will will know how to minimize these problems and get the best results out of the available gear.

You'll notice that I agreed with the main 16/24 argument in my earlier post. I was just making the point that we encourage people to up-grade more often than we tell them to get some specialized training.

ROG.



Rog,

It's not that I make recording at low levels a matter of practice, but allowing plenty of room does make for less hassles during mixing, not having to apply attenuation in the box to each track, so that when I sum the tracks, I'm not summing to something that's overdriving.

It's just a matter of convenience, I suppose. When I think back to when I had only 16 bit available, I spent a lot of time worrying about maximizing the A/D for each recorded track, and then dialing down from there inside the box.

I do almost no worry of that now and just get on with recording the next track and on to mixing. It's been a very rare occurrence when my songs have summed to the point where I have to go in and adjust gains of individual tracks down - and my 2 channel mixdowns sound very clean.

That wasn't the case in my previous 16 bit life.

I will say that my mixdown 'process' is much less structured than most here, as I don't really have a mixer paradigm in the DAW that I use and I'm fine with it being that way.

Hopefully this is making sense.

-Scott

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