Cubase’s Control Room meter seemed to be the solution to me (and several of my friends) having to use 3rd party K-meter plugins, but when using the RMS value on the meter, which I’ve been trying to use to set initial channel levels, I always got rather uneven results.
Using the ToneGenerator to produce a sine wave - where the RMS value is always 3dB below the peak value, and then automation to provide a step change in the peak output level from zero to -12dBFS and after four beats, back to zero for 4 beats, (then looped). I started out at 120 BPM, so that the steady signal was peaking at -12dBFS for two seconds. However, the RMS max value only reached around -18dBFS before stopping at that value. I had to change the BPM down to 50, i.e. around 4.8 seconds before, the RMS max value finally crept up to the correct -15dBFS.
With this amount of time, the 4ms (approx.) that Cubase takes to integrate a signal level up or down in response to an automation step change can simply be ignored as insignificant to the end result.
**Taking nearly 5 seconds for a steady state RMS signal level to be metered.integrated correctly, does not to me, seem either correct nor useful.
No wonder I was getting very low RMS max levels compared to the peak signal level on variable level material.
***The K-meter standard should have a 600ms integration time, so starting off from a zero signal and then stepping up to a constant amplitude sine wave, the RMS Max value should read -3dB (for a sine wave) below the peak signal level after 600ms (or the same value if the AES-17 button is engaged).
Can someone please look into this and hopefully explain either why something that is supposed to be measuring RMS max values seems to be averaging over a very long time period (and so missing the real values) and not using the K-meter standard, or else acknowledge that this is a bug and fix it.
****Please note that other people have registered an approximate 2 second integration time for this on different computer set-ups (Mac and Win 8.1) so I’m not sure if the longer integration time on mine is due to being on Win 10 (as I encountered the same 4-5 seconds when running up Cubase 8.0.30 as a check).
But if you are offering K-meter scales, the metering should be adjusted to suit.
Thank you.
- 64 bit Cubase Pro 8.5.15 on Win 10.
** generally edited to change previously used ‘peak RMS’ to ‘RMS max’
*** edited to incorporate K-meter standard integration time.
****additional text.