ProSoundWeb: Are you getting the best possible sound from your mixing console or sound system? By setting up your mixer and system for proper gain staging (gain structuring), you might be surprised how clean they can sound.
Gain staging is the process of setting the gain of each stage of a mixer, or of a sound system, to achieve the best compromise between noise and distortion. The goal is to have every stage in the mixer (or the sound system) operating at its optimum signal level.
3 comments:
I liked reading this article because it keeps introducing more terminology to me and keeps my exposure to the sound industry going. There was a lot of information that I didn’t fully understand but I was able to make educated guesses what they meant for at least know what they were referencing. While it might be a slow process to learn about sound and audio engineering through reading alone, I think it’s helping me be more prepared for when I dive further into sound later on. I hope that I can get the most out of reading now so I can apply it in the future. I think it was super to cool to hear more about how you manage the peaks in audio and how to effectively use gain staging when mixing audio. I would love to learn a lot more about mixing and how to properly manage audio in musicals and live music.
Setting sound system and mixing console gains seem so complicated but they are not. This was a super informative article and it helped me refresh and hone my knowledge on mixing sound. I feel like a lot of sound design is very simple but also complicated. Theoretically, it is very simple and straightforward but in practice it is very hard to get right and hone your ear especially for live theatre and concerts. This also makes me think about the differences between live sound and the music industry where studio sound is so much more controlled compared to live sound. I feel like with live sound, there is so much more chaos and on the fly damage control involved whereas studio mixing is a lot more controlled but also so so different. I really really want to gain a lot more exposure and knowledge of studio mixing and engineering and compare the differences with live theatre.
I was taught that your mix should sound like it was recorded in a studio. I’d like to say I’ve gotten close, but it’s incredibly impressive to hear it done really well. I know how to mix the voices and the instruments of my high school’s ensemble and band, but it’s a huge skill to be able to do it for so many diverse sounding musicians. When I switched to a digital board, the ability to then send different buses to different outputs, and mix and match outputs was monumental. I’m able to keep digital effects out of the monitors, send certain sounds through only the left speaker, etc. I was able to run 3 separate systems for an immersive production all through the same sound board. For one show, I had a speaker set up in the middle of the theater with a vocal eq to make only certain microphones sound like they were coming from a radio.
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