DB boosts of over 18 dB?

I'm working on a project to hear the effects of dither and I need to be able to boost a clip by 60 dB. The Process -> Audio -> Gain only allows 18db max. 

Any thoughts? 

I found that normalize seems to do the trick. I was hoping for a specific dB boost though.

Cheers

If memory serves me correctly then the effect of several dB increments equals the arithmetic sum of the increments. So if you can't obtain a 60dB increase in one operation you could do it by doing 4 separate increments of 15dB (for example). 15+15+15+15=60dB This is a very large increase in signal level, so your original signal level of the clip would have to be tiny. I think that a 60dB increase is roughly equivalent to the difference between a dynamic microphone signal compared to a line level signal, to give it some context.

See my reply on your other thread, but boosting the signal level to hear how the dither sounds isn't the right way to go.  On the other hand, if you are boosting the signal level to hear the difference between truncation vs. dither (not various dithers vs. other dithers), then that's ok.

but I just realized that the fader drop by -60 is post dither

I'm confused. Which fader drop, and which dither?  If you're using Sonar's built-in dither it is added post all faders.   If you're using a dither plugin, then yeah the output volume fader would be after that.

Incidentally, I like the sonitus eq for radical gain changes. It can do +/- 24 dB and is easily stackable for as many as is needed.

So to hear truncation vs dither (in a non real-world scenario) take your  nice clean signal, drop it down -80 dB (3 sonitus eqs at -24 and one more at -8), export to a 16 bit file without dither. Bring it back into Sonar and raise it +80 dB. 

Do this again but use Sonar's dither on export. I just gave this a try and it worked well to demonstrate truncation vs dither.

JoshWolfer


I'm working on a project to hear the effects of dither and I need to be able to boost a clip by 60 dB. The Process -> Audio -> Gain only allows 18db max. 

Any thoughts? 

I found that normalize seems to do the trick. I was hoping for a specific dB boost though.

Cheers

Get this...

http://www.sonalksis.com/freeg.htm

Put multiple instances in line until you get the gain you want (at +18 db each).  There's also a Trim Range on this that let's you add another +36 db if you want (I've never actually tried that though.)

I suppose you could do it with Channel Tools too, but you'd need a lot more instances to get what you want.

...oh...didn't know about the +24 db on the Sonitus EQ...  Still...Sonalksis FreeG is a nice bit of free "audio duct tape" that gets used a fair bit at my house.