CMU School of Drama


Friday, February 24, 2017

An Examination Of Bandwidth, Dynamic Range And Normal Operating Levels

ProSoundWeb: Audio signals are, of course, speech and music, and in this article we will examine the nature of those signals in terms of their requirements in bandwidth, dynamic range and normal operating levels.

The nature of peak and average levels of music and speech will be discussed.

In addition, we’ll look at the standard methods of dealing with signal peaks and required shifts in signal operating levels.

1 comment:

wnlowe said...

I think the article brings up some interesting points when analyzing the relationship between the level of spoken voice reinforcement with audio and the room’s noise floor. I thought that it was really cool that the article brought up the noise floor and about the ideal relationship/how far above the noise floor should the average level of speech be. My issue comes when the article beings talking about dbs in relationship to SPLs because of the lack of clarification. If one does not know about the different versions of dbs then SPLs will seem to be the same thing as a db one finds listed on a mixing console, but they aren’t the same and this could cause some serious issues without the mixer having any idea with what is wrong or how to fix it; however, the conversation about the noise floor could also be misleading since it does not specify the type dbs.