In Reply to: how often: 0dBFS below 40Hz? posted by dave789 on August 2, 2009 at 08:26:02:
At what stage of the production process or reproduction process are you asking? Are you asking if sub bass clips?
If you are talking about the levels on CDs, DVDs, etc, there is no way to answer that really. The answer is disc/material/mix/master specific.
If you are talking about recording, some engineers will incorrectly have kick drums and bass and synth parts, using more bits to represent the wave than needed, riding up to 0. There are morons that clip.
Now, from a mixer's standpoint, most productions today are digital at some point. In digital world, if you have 24+ tracks using bits like that, the mix bus is going to overload, the inserted plug-ins will crap out, and and it will be one big distorted, dynamic mess. Engineers generally place high pass filters (around 30Hz) on mix busses for music mixes. This is not a hard rule that everyone follows, but it is a general rule. There just isn't a need to reproduce low frequencies down there. They eat up lots of headroom left in. For movies it is a different story. I don't mix movies, so....
If you look at the way most music and movies are mastered, I would think that it would not happen often. When those guys smash the hell out of the mixes with multi-band compressors and brickwall limiters, the bass tends to go away and the imaging falls apart. So, I would not think that you would ever see it on a modern production of any kind.
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Follow Ups
- RE: how often: 0dBFS below 40Hz? - harecording@sbcglobal.net 14:09:44 09/19/09 (0)