How to find the balance between no clipping and quality?

[bugmenot]

When converting tapes/records to cd, how do you guys manage to set the volume level low enough so you don't get clipping, but high enough to get a good quality recording? There always seems to be a part of a tape or record louder than the rest that will clip, so I set the volume low. But then, the quality suffers... Any suggestions?

[waxcylinder]

What you are talking about is called dynamic range. For many recordings (particularly classical say) the recording engineers deliberately create a wide dynamic range (i.e big spread between loud bits and soft bits). Lots of modern pop/rock records (and often remastered re-issues of older recordings) deliberately have the dynamic range reduced to make the CD sound as "loud" as possible - most audiophiles would regard this as a bad thing.

But back to your question: the first trick is to make you meters larger - In 1.2 you can undock the meter toolbar. Click your cursor in the horizontal etched bar at the left of the meter toolbar and drag it down - then click and drag the right hand side to entend the width. When you widen it far enough you will see a set of numbers. While recording try not o let the lodest part extend much above -6db on the scale. You can push it right up to the 0 - but if you go above zero then you will get clipping (unlike tape where the physics works on your side - with digital recording going into oversaturation is very unforgiving).

The second trick is to be aware that you can turn the meters on for monitoring prior to actually pressing the record button. This is not a very well documented feature (and IIRC may not even be documented at all). All you need to do is to click ONCE in the area in the input meter (the one with the MIC icon) - but be aware that clicking in the meter area gain will turn monitoring off - AND there is no obvious visual cue to tell you whether metering is on or off (a bone of contention for many of us users).

Witn experience you can learn to visaully spot on an LP wher the loud bits are - meaning that you can reduce the time you spend monitoring prior to recording

If you have set the peak level right prior to recording and then you find that your lower level sounds suffer in quality - then it is likely that either you have poor or damaged soucre recorded material (test tis by playing the LP/tape on your hi-fi). Or if that is ok then there is likely to be a fault in your recording chain which is giving you a too high noise floor.

WC