Lately, I’ve noticed that my MixConsole meters don’t always represent their tracks’ respective audio levels accurately. For example, if a sampled kick drum routinely peaks at -8 dBFS, it’s meter will often peak just below -8 dBFS and sometimes well below, as if it missed the audio transient altogether. Meanwhile, I can hear the kick just fine. If I had to guess, I’d say that the meters are sampling the audio stream only a few dozen times per second and, consequently, miss some shorter transients.
Anybody else seeing this? Can I adjust something to fix it?
Whoa! I just reduced the meters’ fallback from 40 dB/s to 14 dB/s and the problem is magnified! Now, Cubase only registers peaks on a few hits and sometimes falls back without responding to three or four hits in a row. It’s as if the meters are intermittently deaf, for up to a full second.
For the record, updating my video drivers apparently solved the problem.
The last driver package I installed for my NVidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti video card was version 368.22. This was three years ago, but I expect Windows Automatic Update did something to them since. Without looking, I installed the latest, version 430.86, and everything looks good now at all meter fallback rates. If anyone cares, installation options were identical - I always do a minimal, custom installation, disabling the optional accelerators and tools (e.g., PhysX, GeForce Experience) on my DAWs.