bump

Robert- another hall of fame thread. Big thanks!!!

I'm looking forward....no, i'm pacing up and down, for part II

Bump

Wow! Great thing to bump, Robert. That is a wonderful thing for people who haven't hooked up audio equipment before. This should be stickied to the top of the forum, though it might make a lot of people who post when they are new, not post. All their questions would be answered and we'd never get to meet any of you great people!

lol. When the questions stop, the learning stops. I pray that never happens.
I am glad that stuff like this is helpful, and that's why we do it.

Seems like a good time to resurrect this one.

I get frustrated at my lack of ability to not only spell, but all the miscues i make, then i realize Hey I 1. do not get paid for this, and 2. Do it is between far more important things. So how ever i spell it i say either read or not, cause that is as good as it gets.

It was a good time to resurrect it!

I've been pondering this for the last few weeks.

My setup is a Mackie 402 mixer going into a M-Audio 2496. I plug my guitar into a channel on the mixer and press the DI button on. I then set the gain level just below the point that the clipping LED will come on. According to the mixer manual I should have the main mixer level around 0dBs. If I set it up like that the signal is usaully way to hot in MC. I end up having the main level down around -12 or -24 dBs for the signal in MC to be comfortably below 0dBs.

My question is should I just continue like this or should I be reducing the gain so the main level is higher? It sounds alright the way I am doing things now but it's always something I end up thinking might not be right..

are you recording in 24 or 16 bit?  you should be in 24bit to record (then you have to dither down to 16 for export)

between -12dB and -6dB is a good place to record for 24bit - that gives you good headroom for mixing.

I'm recording in 24bit. 

My concern is that I'm not getting the best signal into the soundcard if the main mixer level is somewhere down about -24dBs when it goes to the 2496. Is it better to have the channel gain higher (although below clipping point) and the main mixer level lower or the other way around? It just seems to be really low going into the sound card but i'm trying to keep the the levels in MC at around -10dB...