I just came across this

http://todmaffin.com/blogs/radio/2006/0 ... d1-review/

and was struck by this:

In a truly innovative design, a brief shadow recording is continuously made 20dB down from the normal input and stored in memory for a short time. If a transient peak clips the standard input, the lower level audio is normalized and inserted instead to prevent peak distortion. Of course, if the overload exceeds 20dB then all bets are off, but this is far easier than running two mics with a split track with one at 20dB down.

I can't believe I never thought of doing this before (running two mics.) So ingenious!

Anyway, I just thought I'd share that.

That's quite a handy idea - by no means perfect, but it could save you in some situations.

Luckily, with 24-bit audio, we have more dynamic rage which makes things easier.

Rodabod wrote:That's quite a handy idea - by no means perfect, but it could save you in some situations.

Luckily, with 24-bit audio, we have more dynamic rage which makes things easier.

also, clipping is generally only a few samples, so replacing with a boosted lower resolution recording will not be noticeable at all. It could be interesting to see how it handles an alectric gtr amp doing some constant/serious clipping...


mike

Hmm.. Has anyone ever split a mic singal into two pre-amps? It seems you would lose some energy resulting in a higher noise floor.

jason smith wrote:Hmm.. Has anyone ever split a mic singal into two pre-amps? It seems you would lose some energy resulting in a higher noise floor.

It's not quite that simple, but regarding noise - it shouldn't be a problem as mic preamps are voltage amplifiers and if you use a bog-standard mic splitter or just use a Y-cable, then roughly the same voltage will appear on the inputs as the loads afre effectively in parallel.

Things get a little more complicated when you look at the load that the mic would see, as it will halve when splitting into two preamps which can cause problems such as bass-loss and some signal loss (depends on the mic in question...)

Why not just record at a safe level?

davidpye wrote:Why not just record at a safe level?

pussy!

Rodabod wrote:Luckily, with 24-bit audio, we have more dynamic rage which makes things easier.

Hah, I love this typo! I'll say we have more rage with 24 bits!

I may use this as my .sig