Digital trim/gain in mixer or DAW?

The Lounge Other Gear
1

The K-mix has a digital trim on input. You have to adjust it all he time, as it’s so easy to drive inputs into the red.

image
image2266×1488 205 KB

Seeing as how all the processing is done in the digital realm, should I take the time to adjust the trim? Or should I keep it all the way down, and just add gain in Ableton? Will the sound suffer at all?

(As an aside, when using it as a standalone mixer without the DAW, you can just use the compressor’s makeup gain to do the same thing).

Full signal flow diagram here:

https://www.keithmcmillen.com/downloads/

2

Whether you’re running analog gain or digital gain, you usually want to use input gain only when needed.

The best workflow:

  1. Keep your gear from clipping. Don’t drive it too hard (everything at 100%). You usually want a bit of headroom to avoid internal clipping (especially if you’re using overdrive).
  2. If for whatever reason you still need some gain to get a healthy signal level, then apply it.

I usually keep the mixer input just from the red, the output just from the red, then I adjust the analog gain on my interface to have as high digital domain signal as possible.

If K-mix to the DAW has a low signal, wouldn’t it be a K-mix output problem (not an input problem)?

1 Like
3

That’s my question, I guess. Where’s the best place to gain the signal?

Let’s say I have an 0-Coast plugging into the K-Mix, at a healthy level (it can get really, really healthy :slight_smile: ). I can adjust the K-Mix trim so that the input peaks in the orange, and all is well. But if I change the patch and it gets louder, then the K-Mix clips, and not in a good way.

Because the K-Mix converts the signal to digital immediately, before adding any gain, all additional gain is in the digital realm. So instead of worrying about overdriving the inputs, I thought I might just keep them as low as possible, and makeup gain in the DAW. Especially as I can also add a limiter, just in case.