pucho812
Well-known member
I read a lot of so called mastering guys. They all talk of clipping converters. I can only assume they are mis-using the terminology, or something. Am I missing something here?
EmRR said:I don't think there's been any hip-hop or rap done without converter clipping in mastering in 2 decades, it's expected as part of the process.
pucho812 said:Sounds awful to me. lol
Not surprising, the customer expects it to clip cleanly or doesn't even think about it.Rochey said:There are still plenty of products on the market that use old converters that have horrible saturation behaviour. (Rollover, where it goes from max positive to max negative, is one of the most horrid).
The last converter I worked on (PCM1865) was defined very clearly to "clip like an opamp", so you'd clip at 0x0FFF (24 bit) until the signal comes back within range.
prudent design could limit over drive capability with design of analog side input stage.However, there are a few arguments to avoid doing this
A) Go much above the input signal range and you'll start shorting the signal through the device ESD diodes to the supply rail. Not good for your source
not sure what you are describing. Some analog paths saturate fairly suddenly, some over a small range. I would expect saturation in a A/D convertor to be more sudden, than gradual. Note: there is one digital console with a soft limiter built into the mic preamp that some customers apparently like.B) THD near clipping increases exponentially.
not sure what this means?Given the extended dynamic range of mastering ADC's, you have more dynamic range than you have THD.
that is the classic trade off between noise floor and saturation. For years operators with a little(?) digital knowledge hit the convertors hard to avoid quantization noise. This is not an issue with modern convertors that have an analog sounding noise floor.Better to sacrifice 2 or 3 dB of headroom and get both good SNR and THD.
Mastering is the last step of the process where we stick a fork in it... In my personal opinion clipping is undesirable, but they aren't mixing for me as their paying customers.C) Why commit distortion to a recording? Wouldn't you be better recording clean and adding distortion as a post process?
Rochey said:C) Why commit distortion to a recording? Wouldn't you be better recording clean and adding distortion as a post process?
JohnRoberts said:Mastering is the last step of the process where we stick a fork in it... In my personal opinion clipping is undesirable, but they aren't mixing for me as their paying customers.
I am not raising this as a new question... Long before there were A/D convertors people saturated their analog audio paths, so good design involved fast/clean overload recovery.EmRR said:While you guys are raising these questions, I'm telling you IT IS AN OPERATIONAL STANDARD within particular genre, and has been for a very long time. It's all over everything you hear in those genre.
I find both sides of this debate(?) humorous... that horse left the barn a long time ago.Gold said:Making a technical argument against clipping is a situation where things around here get hilarious. Non users pulling numbers out of space to describe sound. Yeah, right.
Rochey said:Finally - I still don't understand why you would distort using the converters instead of in a post processing algorithm?
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