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Do you lose resolution by recording to HD first and "Normalizing" to 0dB later?

Posted by High-end Dreamer (A) on March 17, 2002 at 21:07:00

I was just reading a paragraph in a review of the Alesis, and the guy said the following:

"In a traditional workstation, a track is scanned for its peaks...'digital zero' is determined, and, if desired, the level of the entire track can be raised by that amount and, typically, a new file is rendered."

I was thinking that when recording to the Masterlink, one would have to figure out where the highest-level peak signals were BEFOREHAND and use that level as your 0 dB reference. In this way, the recording would maximize the number of bits used to record the track in question. I don't see how you can record to the HD at some "safe" lower level in the first stage, and then go in and have the Masterlink boost everything by N decibels. Does this practice equate to sacrificing some resolution?

[BTW, In my application, I'm talking about an analog source that you would be converting to digital on the fly, as you're recording to the Masterlink, so there are no digital files that can be 'scanned' for peaks beforehand.]

OR.....do they assume you're not a complete moron and that you're leaving a safe but not HUGE amount of space under the 0dB ceiling on the first pass, and since you'd have to be under it by *more* than 6dB before you would subsequently end up "losing" that first bit of resolution, you don't really have to worry about it? (--for two reasons: one, anyone with a brain can play a few seconds of the highest-level passages and have a feel for how close they should set the recording level to be in the 6dB ballpark; and two, losing 1 bit when you're working with 24 bits is trivial anyway, because there's no playback system that can resolve a full 24-bits of dyn range anyway)

Any thoughts/wisdom on this?

:^)

Thanks in advance for any info provided--

Mike

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