It can be challenging keeping the audio in the green/yellow

Posted about 1 year ago by Wes Garland

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Wes Garland
Wes Garland

I'm using an iPhone SE2 with an Apple-branded Lighting to 3.5mm TRS adapter for audio output going into the RCA connectors.

If I use iTunes to play rock music and run the phone full-blast, I easily get into the red.  This suggests that we need to be really careful if we start sending from a mixing console with +4dBu outputs.

 If I turn it down to stay in the green most of the time, quiet songs go blue.  There seems to be a sweet spot where it's blinking yellow a lot, but it's a bit finicky and I can see this being difficult to stay in with a live band.

Does the red light mean clipping, or just close-to-clipping?  Knowing that would be helpful in setting levels, and it doesn't have a fixed definition across the industry. (X32 wants you to mix at -18 and lights the red light 1dB before clipping, QU-series wants you to mix a 0 and lights the clip indicator 10dB before clipping ... way to confuse the guys in the trenches!)

Anyhow. What about expanding the green range a bit lower, applying a very slow compressor about 4:1 across the signal and then bumping the signal back up into the current green range with some makeup gain? It would make it easier to hit appropriate sound-level targets.

I guess I can do this on the mixing console myself, especially with some concrete guidance from Limbic. That's one reason why I'm interested in going USB audio from the console to Maestro; at least with digital audio going over I can be confident that I'm not clipping the analog hardware before your input ADC.

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Wesley Byrnside posted about 1 year ago

I had a similar problem.  I am intigrating my computer, lighting, and sound system.  My computer's audio output was not powerful enough to provide a consistent signal to drive Maestro (red lining or not detected). I was able to put a external sound card between Maesto and computer. Since I have an fiber optic out, I used the Sound Blaster G6.  The G6 is excellent at reproducing audio fedelity.  I connected head phone output from sound card to Maesto.  The G6 has an optical output that I feed to the sound system.   I can also put a set of head phones on to creat custome playlists/light shows without disturbing others. 



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