[ardour-dev] Where to go digital

[Paul Winkler]

On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 08:23:42AM -0800, Mark Knecht wrote:
> Or any mic pre using the wonderful RFC compressor is another great
> choice. The RFC has been around for years, has a great reputation, is
> very easy to use and only costs about $200 IIRC.
> 
> Using an analog conpressor is always preferable in my experience.

I'm assuming you mean RNC?
It's a great compressor, but it's not really a peak limiter.  I do often
use it for input, but that's partly because smooth headphone levels help
me get better vocal performance.  It reduces the self-consciousness of
the singer.  The fact that I have fewer things needing attention during
mixdown is a nice bonus too ;-)

I do'nt have a limiter and I don't miss it. I'd just get an ADC with a
sufficiently low noise floor and set levels conservatively.  When you
have 100 dB of SNR at the converter, you can get away with pretty low
levels. Just turn down the output of the mic pre.  Noise from the mic
pre and mic is not exacerbated by doing this, because you're turning
that down too.  You do lose some resolution, but I don't lose sleep over
that.

Of course, professionals might be working with tighter requirements or
more extreme acoustic signals than I am.  But my Delta has specs of 99
dB SNR at the input and I've found that to be quite forgiving, and those
are pretty cheap nowadays. If you splurge on Mytek or something you can
get that up to ~120 dB.  That is quite a lot of headroom.

I have much bigger problems with things like ambient noises while
recording very quiet sounds.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com