The further into the future we go, the funnier it gets, but there is still very proper reasons for using NICKLEBACK for gain setting.... Nice Pic KG... Let me explain.

If KANEBOATS had been serious, depending on where in Vivaldi's Concerto he picked to set his gains he probably would have set the gains too high. The reason is that there are lots of very quiet, medium and loud sections in most classical recordings. If you are setting gains with a quiet song, or quiet section of a song you will find that you will clip easily with other more normal "boating" recordings, OR that you are only using about 15% of the head unit's colume control to reach full power from your stereo.

Consider this screen shot of Diana Krall's "Quiet Nights" The dark Roarchalk Ink blot - looking thing is the actual visual representation of the music. As you move from left to right you move from the beginning to the end of the song. The lighter areas above and below the dark part represents headroom left over and not used by the recording or the recording medium. The horizontal floor and ceiling at the very top and bottom of the lighter areas represent MAX AMPLITUDE. You can't record anything louder than what will fit between the floor and ceiling of this lighter area. One can infer a parallel between this picture and amplifier or head unit clipping. If one tries to make the dark representation of the song louder such that the peaks extend above and below the lighter area's floor and ceiling, it is the same thing we describe audibly as clipping distortion. Pretend you could turn a knob that made the dark aection of the picture taller both top and bottom, so that parts of the dark waveform extended past the floorand ceiling of the white area. IF this were an o-scope pic of the amp's output you woudl see those parts outside of the white area will be clipped.



A very quiet recording would have a horizontal ink-blot thing that was very narrow vertically. A very loud recording will have a very wide ink-blot thing. Vivaldi's Concerto will have skinny quiet parts, and loud wide parts. A recording that does not have a lot of loud passage will make it very hard to set gains; if you set the amp where it clips using QUIET NIGHTS loudest section as pictured below, you will find other songs that have greater amplitude and use up more of the area between the lighter area's floor and ceiling. The amp will have been set to max clipping based on a non-maxed-out recording..... So as I pointed out above, your gains will be higher than necessary if you use this recording to set gains, and louder sondgs will clip the stereo at high volumes.


More on that in the next post


quiet nights.jpg