Fact or Fiction "Sweet spot in Mic preamp"

[HA_DA_JA]

Hello everyone a happy first of the month to you all.
I was thinking of going through all my vocal mics and matching them up with all my mic pres to find whether there is such a things as the mic preamp sweet spot.
Do you think this exists and what would be the best way to find this?
I heard a person more experienced then me say that it is usually around 70% of the gain and fine tune from there.
I have not spent an enormous time with mics and preamps to then take more time to find the alleged "sweet spot ".
Most time with the client it is a matter of setting a mic up in front of the person or instrument move it around a bit for best result and press record.
Is this one of the "dark arts" in the voodoo of music crafting?

[wez]

i am sure that a hell of a lot of it is psychology. imagine that the 'sweet spot', for example, was at 100% gain. you'd never let yourself believe it - or hear it - because your brain is telling you that it has to be between 70-80 %.

same if it's lower... you set the gain at 10% and the voice in your head starts whispering things about headroom and signal to noise.

having said that... every piece of gear i've ever owned has had a 'spot' that just works. sometimes it's broad (say, the top quarter), or very narrow (manley vari-mu input for instance - between 8 and 8.2!)

then again i could be imagining it.

[Chinagraf]

I always figured the sweet spot is where I crank the knob till I listen an go "Sweeeet"

[TimS]

I always figured the sweet spot is where I crank the knob till I listen an go "Sweeeet"

perfect analogy Andy!

[jkhuri44]

sweet spot depends on the pre imo.

cleaner pre's tend to sound more uniform across their gain ranges, where as amps that distort the harder u push them may tend to impart more (insert sexy audio wank here).

my 2 c.

also, to check and see if the mojo is psychological or not, crank the monitors and lower the gain, record 2 takes with 2 diff mic pre settings, and listen back as closely matched as possible.

[jithknot]

I don't know about sweet spot, but mic pres do sound "non-linearly different" at different gain stages if that makes any sense.

[tony]

To test for a sweet spot on a mic pre would you do something like:

play a track back through a speaker with a mic set up in front of it, record multipul takes with the pre's gain set at different levels. Then normalise all the tracks to see if there was a particual tonal differance?

Not sure if this would work but I am just not sure how else you could find the 'sweet' spot of a pre as the volume difference would really change your view.

[rick]

everything analog has a sweet spot but it has more to do with signal flow , gain structure then how you are feeling at the time

odd question i thought ... but then again i wasted two thousand words on the subject some years ago :)

[Gian]

*snip*
...but then again i wasted two thousand words on the subject some years ago :)

Never a waste if it gets someone thinking.

[Linear]

The sweet spot for me is the gain setting on a pre where you have the minimum amount of noise, and the maximum level with enough headroom in place so you don't get distortion (ie leave a good 10-15db in hand for unexpected transients). In other words, the fundamentals of gain staging.

The thing is, the better the preamp, the wider the sweet spot. I have the misfortune to use an m-box the other day, and was astounded at how little headroom that thing had. it was either noisy, or distorting so really there was no sweet spot. That's why great preamps (like 1084's etc) are revered, because you have to really push them to distort badly as their 'sweet spot' is so large. it make the engineer look great because it minimises the chances of fcuking the recording up.

Of course, the noise/distortion thing depends alot on what you're recording and the mic that's connected before/nibnob that's connected after (tape machine or compressor or converters) so I'm not so sure you can test everything before the event to find their sweet spots, you just need to use your ears and be tuned to the nasties that bad gain staging gives you.

Chris

[rick]

mmm ," do you really understand gain stages ..?"
i could spend 4000 words on that one
and still have to explain it over and over again
sweet :)

i counter you chris , my m box does have a sweet spot
ie on the back of the shelf hiding from any chance i will ever touch it again
sweet :)

[HA_DA_JA]

Rick would you be kind enough to share some of the major points of your 2000 word article on this subject?
Or is this the next fodder for AT?
Cheers

[rick]

it went something like

"everything has a sweet spot - the point in space and time were it was designed to sound and work its best "
"most guys have signal flow and circuit gain confused and are running their analog units way too hot trying to feed their daw with maximum gain and missing the sweet spot totally , its a common misuse , too common really "

then whatever AT actually printed - it as years ago still very relevant though it seems

at some christmas all those articles are coming out in a book , but i never commit to which christmas

[rob]

bane of my life...always coming across "dudes with daws" who insist on filling up the windows with waveform...then they pop out of their converters with a signal peaking at +24dVu and averaging +16dBu and wonder why none of their analog outboard works properly....

[Linear]

aint that the truth.

thing is, when you're running a DAW at 'normal' levels, you can barely see the waveform on the screen. i often get asked if i'm running 'hot' enough, and more often than not general feedback is that my levels are 'low', mainly because on one side of the converters is a tape machine, and on the other side is a console.

I've received tracks before to mix, where I've had to pull the master DAW gain down a good 20-30db just so the converters/console don't shit themselves.

[rick]

aint that the truth.

I've received tracks before to mix, where I've had to pull the master DAW gain down a good 20-30db just so the converters/console don't shit themselves.

yeah see converter shit that doesnt sound too sweet ,

i have been meaning to write another gain stage thing ,but i keep reading on the internet all of these "pros" insisting you hit digital as hard as you can before it distorts !

i am getting bit fed up with stuff i keep reading on the net , sometimes i wonder if all the things i know to be true will become false just cause gearsluts says so ...

so if your still wondering about sweet spots , you mic pre will probably sound best when the sound going through it only hits -14db on the peaks on your daw
and that my friends is the real number !

[jkhuri44]

make it louder...

[rick]

thats what la 2a limiters are for :)

[jkhuri44]

the correct response was anger, and swearing...not sly jokes...

damn it !

[chris p]

thing is, when you're running a DAW at 'normal' levels, you can barely see the waveform on the screen.

i have been meaning to write another gain stage thing ,but i keep reading on the internet all of these "pros" insisting you hit digital as hard as you can before it distorts !

i am getting bit fed up with stuff i keep reading on the net , sometimes i wonder if all the things i know to be true will become false just cause gearsluts says so ...

so if your still wondering about sweet spots , you mic pre will probably sound best when the sound going through it only hits -14db on the peaks on your daw
and that my friends is the real number !

(1) Yep to all that. Best thing I ever did was build myself some VU meters calibrated to 4dbu - it gave me "permission" to record at that level even though the LOGIC meters barely registered a signal present.

(2) The "Hit the digital hard" concept is flawed IMHO. The fear of recording at quieter levels is that you "lose bits". Yes, it is true that 24 bit recording at anything less than -6dbFS means that the 24th bit is always 0, but the fallacy lies in the belief that because its 0, it conveys no information. This fallacy confuses signal level with resolution. 24 bit recording means that the bandwidth under 0dbFS is divided into 2 to the power 24 segments (thats quite a few, by the way), which is an issue of resolution. Signal level determines whether those 24 bits are 1 or 0, but that is independent of resolution. So don't worry that a bit is always 0, it still conveys information about the signal level. With due respect to Stav's book, this is one area where I fear he gets it wrong.

The other argument is that recording hotter gives the best signal to noise. The trouble is that louder is not always less noisy - you certainly need enough signal to noise to be workable, but signal to noise is a different concept to volume. The best signal to noise is quite often much less than -1dbFS, especially as Linear Chris says when you are interfacing with analog gear. And people not thinking about gain stages (as I know from my own learning curve) often amplify noise anyway (unthinking compressor use goes high on this list).

So put me squarely in the Rob/Linear/Rick camp. -14dbFS to -18dbFS is where I want to be.

[heathen]

Pretty much everything in life has a sweet spot. Audio gear especially.

[tunetown]

To quote Terry Manning on anther forum "Yellow is the new red".

Everyone should have an old set of analogue VU meters in their gain stage. Zero on those meters reads about minus 20 on these new digital meters. In other words, if you are tracking to hit near zero on digital all of your analogue chain is pushed too hard. This especially becomes a problem if you are a heavy Plugin user. The CPU just doesn't have any headroom to process the information and digital distortion can occur. This is where the term "digititus" comes from.

If your in the box mix sounds digital thin and harsh, try tracking your next song at minus 20db with peaks no greater than minus 14. You may be surprised by the difference.

If your concerned you no longer have that CD loudness crap, just leave that to the mastering guys. Make that Rick's problem. :-)

Cheers

[tunetown]

More information here;

http://recforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/t/15038/0/

Cheers

[The Tasmanian]

To me - pre's with transformers do have a sweet spot - and it is when the pre just goes to the point of overloading - IE too much gain on the pre. I get to know all my pre's and what they do when driven to this point - and beyond. I love the old pre's with 10db gain steps - without the fine adjustment there are may times when the pre is loading and it sounds much more alive than the safer low gain settings. Its one of the best and most creative parts of recording - using pre's slightly driven - all of them have their own personality when driven - or the point just before overloading the input . I spend a lot of time experimenting with this when recording and get incredible results. Its the same to me as a guitar amp - turn it up to a certain point and the amp comes alive -. But also a lot of moderm pre's just sound bad when clipped.

[heathen]

Making things loud has never been easier, making things super loud is just a misguided attempt at making things sound big. Things usually sound smaller the more the clipping increases to me.

I hate the sound of pre's distorting on vox more than anything, well unless it's meant to be there.

Creative distortion is great, accidental distortion from setting the wrong levels sounds like crud most of the time.

[heathen]

To quote Terry Manning on anther forum "Yellow is the new red".

Yep - that's the truth right there.
I track with peaks just entering the yellow (maybe half way at the loudest point) on Tools.
And into the Duality I adjust the trim so that peaks are just hitting the yellow.
And on the Master Bus the same thing.

I have heard guys say to run your SSL 'hot' but I don't know.
On most 'gentler' styles of music it just sounds better (at least less strained) running it 'easy'.
Maybe on Hard Core and heavier styles of Rock and Hip Hop it might be better to run the console hot - what do you SSL owners reckon?

You've got one to play on, give it a go. I'd probably run levels a lot more conservatively than that, but thats just me.