Hey, no problem. I can talk about this stuff all day. And as Craig says, anyone who's keen and interested and trying to figure stuff out constructively is always a pleasure to talk to.

Thinking back over everything I've waffled here, I think the main thing is headroom. If you come in low, you can always make it loud further down the chain. 
 
Back in the tape days, 0dB VU was what we thought of as "in the red". But actually, that was always calibrated to leave a lot of headroom. And you could thus have some fun driving stuff into the red for the saturation you'd get from it.
 
I can't remember the general consensus on this, but I think of about -10dB digital as being the same as 0dB VU. It's not a perfect analogy, but it works ok as a rule of thumb.Certainly, a lot of the ProChannel stuff seems to work well around that assumption.
 
 

Moved to techneques forum. It's about Sonar as well but want to improve the forums useage.


Thanks..

It's a pity that this forum isn't based on a tag system - there are a lot of threads which would sit quite happily in more than one forum. For instance imagine if you could tag this as "Sonar" and "Techniques" and see it in both. 

Hmm, yeah, that'd be good.

Alex is right though, all of this is general practice and not Sonar-specific.
 

There is tagging in the forums software, I think there was a thread about it already in forum discussion forum if not you could create one.. Cheers..

Couple of thoughts...
 
Some FX simulate overloading well below the point of clipping. You may hear an emulation of saturation well on the safe side of clipping.
 
I think the VSTs can report clipping (just wild guess really) other than level in and level out. An example of this is if you raise the gain in a compressor internal to the compressor to the point that you clip it, then compress it below the clipping point. Does the VST tell the host (Sonar)? I think so.
 
In any case, the Pro Channel plugs and the FX Bin can report how hot the signal is into the plugins (color of blinking light). The power light for the PC shows if ANY of them are clipping. Unfortunately, it doesn't have a clip-hold feature so you have to be watching it to know.
 
One way to discover levels between plugs is to drag Channel Tools in. That will give you meters where you want them.
 
 

Okay, here's a definitive answer for the ProChannel. I generated a 1 kHz sine wave at 0.0 peak and brought it into a track, everything set at 0, PC pre-FX bin. The Gain control is what determines the signal level feeding the ProChannel.
 
The overload indicator with the EQ (first processor in the chain) enabled but all settings flat produced a red ring around the outside of the indicator but a yellow circle inside. As soon as the gain control went from 0.0 to +0.1, the indicator turned solid red.

Craig,
 
Do different FX report differently their status? In other words, can an effect report a clip if the input and out put are both -1?