Some years ago I posted here that when I recorded in mono on my JE520 from another MD and the track needed some boosting, I had to turn the gain up much higher than the absolute value of the peak dB reading of the source. The VU meter would light "over" much of the time, but the recording would come out apparently unclipped. If I turned the gain up only to the absolute value of the source's peak dB reading, the copy would barely be boosted at all. I said at the time that it didn't seem to be the case with recordings from CD (and never with recordings in stereo). But something odd has happened since then. [All transfers from CD to MD or MD to CDR mentioned here were optical; trans- fers from CD or CDR to hard disk were made by digital extraction.] I had a monaural CD track which, when ripped to hard disk and analyzed, peaked at 100% of potential amplitude -- i.e., 0 dB. But when I recorded it to MD in monaural mode on my MDS-W1 and copied the MD track at unity gain to CDR, the resulting CDR track peaked at 82.9% (lower than -1.66 dB). I can understand that in cutting stereo data to mono the waveforms might get averaged, and if the left and right channels peak at different points, each channel's peak will get attenuated by whatever is going on in the other chan- nel at that instant, and the peak of the mono combination may be lower than either or both peaks of the stereo channels. But if the two channels are i- dentical to start, shouldn't they peak at the same value at the same point? Even if the mono was slightly off-center and one channel is stronger than the other, that couldn't account for that much softening; I'd have noticed that the mix was off-center with a difference like that. Anyhow, something is odd about recording in mono. Other mono tracks on that MD had also lost volume from their CD sources, while the stereo tracks did not. I can't imagine that the loss happened in transfer from MD to CDR, since the CD recorder can't tell mono from stereo. How, then, does one maximize (or even preserve) levels during monaural recording? ----------------------------------------------------------------- To stop getting this list send a message containing just the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
