Charles Bennett wrote:Not a bug as far as I'm concerned as I do not see this and never have. No DAW has a limiter that is always in the signal path. I believe Fairlight uses 32bit floating point sampling so it would not be needed anyway. Also the last thing you should do is normalise to 0 dbfs. That leaves no headroom at all. 0dbfs is not 0vu. 0vu is usually -18dbfs in DAWs, 0dbfs is therefore +18db above 0vu. What you are doing is overloading the digital to analogue converters of your soundcard hence the distortion.
I'll double-check my D/As on my Focusrite 6i6, but I'm fairly certain I'm not overloading them in the Fairlight page as it wasn't pushing anywhere near the audible volume though my active studio monitors that be indicative of a hot enough signal to clip digitally in the Focusrite. When it comes to audio I'm not a noob, but I'll admit that I didn't check the meters in Mixcontrol to confirm the final output level for the Focusrite (which is a proper rookie error
)
Just out of interest, why do you think that 32-bit FP would not need a limiter - 32-bit FP just means more signal headroom overall, but it is still perfectly possible and often seen as desirable in "Pop" to drive to near 0dBfs in the DAW, "slam the limiter", drive the flattened signal even hotter to just below true 0dBfs and "win the loudness wars" - I should add that a) I really hate the loudness wars as it leads to a loss of the thing that makes great music (i.e. dynamic range), and b) I'm glad that most of that movement has past now
).
OK, now I can't remember what my point was... Oh, yeah, I agree that there is absolutely no reason to have a limiter in the signal path, but the way Fairlight is acting suggests there may be?! It's either that, or Fairlight is using an entirely different audio engine/reference output than the rest of Resolve, which would be a strange decision as it would be (and clearly is) very difficult to reconcile what is "heard" in Fairlight and what is "heard" in the Edit and Deliver pages, but perhaps that is what you are meaning by having a DAW (Fairlight) -18dBfs indicated as 0dBfs vs. a true (Edit/Deliver) 0dBfs.
If that is the case, would you know of any way to either switch all parts of Resolve to -18dBfs monitoring (so it is at least consistent!), or switch Fairlight to 0dBfs monitoring (so it would hard-clip when the rest of the program does) as I couldn't find anything obvious in the manual?
I guess until I can work out how to do that, I'm going to have to rely a whole lot more on visual metering to -18dBfs on the master fader level on the Fairlight page!