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1. Re: clip meter
SteveG(AudioMasters) Nov 23, 2014 3:00 AM (in response to therealdobro)Unless it's altered, it doesn't 'work' in Audition at all. All Audition does is to display the clip signal sent from your sound device - that's why it has a separate reset mechanism. Really, it has to be like that, because Audition has no way of working out that the input signal was larger than could be digitised, as it has no information about the analog signals presented to the device - how could it have?
You can't have a sample greater than 0dBFS - the FS stands for Full Scale!
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2. Re: clip meter
therealdobro Nov 23, 2014 9:56 AM (in response to SteveG(AudioMasters))Your answer tells me that I don't understand this at all. Zoom in on a clipped signal and the graph line that connects the individual sample dots goes off the scale past 0dBFS. I've always thought that was Audition's way of saying it's trying to assign samples higher values than are available, and that the signal is too powerful for the AD/DA translations to handle, hence the distortion.
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3. Re: clip meter
SteveG(AudioMasters) Nov 23, 2014 10:15 AM (in response to therealdobro)therealdobro wrote:
Your answer tells me that I don't understand this at all. Zoom in on a clipped signal and the graph line that connects the individual sample dots goes off the scale past 0dBFS.
Correct - you don't! But you might shortly...
In fact, the waveform can indeed go way off the scale... but the sample dots never do. How? Well, here's a demo I made years ago using Audition 1 to demonstrate just this: Waveform overshoots but samples stop at 0dB. What you have to remember is that the samples don't necessarily represent the position of the waveform at any given instant, but do represent the rate at which it's changing. The implications are significant...
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4. Re: clip meter
therealdobro Nov 23, 2014 11:38 PM (in response to SteveG(AudioMasters))So, the audio interface decides which sample values to assign to a given signal and Audition just represents that on the meter? If that's right, does that mean that any DAW would represent the same signal through the same interface the same way?
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5. Re: clip meter
SteveG(AudioMasters) Nov 24, 2014 2:06 AM (in response to therealdobro)therealdobro wrote:
So, the audio interface decides which sample values to assign to a given signal and Audition just represents that on the meter? If that's right, does that mean that any DAW would represent the same signal through the same interface the same way?
If the DAW is drawing the lines correctly, then yes. And these days, most of them do. What Audition's Normalizer does is to work out where the highest drawn peak would be, and use this as the basis for the normalize level - it has nothing to do with where the samples are. A lot of the misconceptions about this are based on some very bad education about what samples actually represent going back decades...
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6. Re: clip meter
therealdobro Nov 25, 2014 8:07 PM (in response to SteveG(AudioMasters))Over at SOS, people I respect are saying that the clip meter being triggered is more a matter of the software than the interface.
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7. Re: clip meter
Bob Howes Nov 25, 2014 10:02 PM (in response to therealdobro)I must admit I've been wondering about this, if only because Audition can give a red clip warning on an individual track's meter in a multitrack session even if the overall level from the Master out on the mixer is below the clipping level. I've always assumed that Audition flags a clip on its meters when the rate of change among samples would indicate a level that would be going above the 0dBFS level.
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8. Re: clip meter
SteveG(AudioMasters) Nov 25, 2014 10:36 PM (in response to therealdobro)therealdobro wrote:
Over at SOS, people I respect are saying that the clip meter being triggered is more a matter of the software than the interface.
There's only one person there with any respectable knowledge, and that's Hugh R. What he's saying is that yes, it's the software that flashes a light when samples hit 0dB, possibly more than once successively. Well duh - of course it is! It's all software-driven! What I should have said in my first reply was, instead of "All Audition does is to display the clip signal sent from your sound device" was All audition does is to display that the signal that it considers to be clipped, based on the incoming sample data, with the clip light". And that would be a mouthful, but it's what happens.
On this basis, Audition can also work out that any signal it's got recorded with the same conditions should trigger the clip light, and that's pretty much what it does.
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9. Re: clip meter
therealdobro Nov 25, 2014 10:50 PM (in response to SteveG(AudioMasters))What's critical for me is to avoid clipping when recording and mixing, and I think I'm cautious enough to avoid this 99% of the time, but it's amazing the rabbit holes I can disappear down sometimes trying to understand this stuff better.


