Stereo master fader12/24/2022 ![]() ![]() Most DAWs can record 24‑bit audio, but to ensure sufficient headroom, their mixers typically work with 32‑bit, 48‑bit or even 64‑bit numbers. The solution is to make our mixing engine employ a greater word length than is used to represent the recorded audio. ![]() That, on its own, is OK, but if we add another full‑scale signal from another input, we have nowhere to go, because 1111 plus 1111 is 11110: a five‑bit number, which cannot be represented in a four‑bit recording system. ![]() But this headroom problem really starts to show up when we start adding signals together - otherwise known as mixing.įor ease of explanation, let's imagine we use a four‑bit recording system, so our 0dBFS point is reached when a sample has a full house of ones: 1111. This point is often referred to as 0dBFS, where the 'FS' stands for Full Scale. It simply has no way of representing a signal that goes any higher, so when it comes to the digital‑to‑analogue conversion you will end up with the familiar clipped waveform that sounds very distorted. When you reach the point where all the bits are set to one, you have reached the limit of the system's headroom. Each sample is represented as a series of binary bits, each of which can either be set to one or zero. In the analogue world, headroom was usually limited by the power-supply voltage rails, but in the digital world it is set by the word length used to encode the signal. It is the maximum signal level any signal chain can handle before distortion takes place. Let me clarify what I mean here by headroom. The master fader and mix bus behind it are no different, in many ways, from their counterparts on an analogue mixer, and moving to the digital world hasn't magically taken away the restriction of headroom or changed the way maths works when you add things together! It definitely shouldn't be used as a monitor volume control, and it also works differently in the HD and LE versions of Pro Tools. In my travels through the world of Pro Tools over the years, I have found that the humble master fader is a part of the mixer that is very often misunderstood and misused. Know how to use the Pro Tools master fader properly and you need never suffer clipping in your mixes again. ![]()
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