So mine is a home environment. I sit in the sweet spot of a couple of Tannoy Reveals. They are powered by an amlp and I also have a Focusrite 18i 20 laden with keyboards.
It seems to me there are two ways of listening to volume.
One is as part of finishing off a project - mastering.
The second is when you are composing or working with a track and what you require is listening comfort for your own ears. BAsically when you are just messin. You might even be on Utube or here.
I am here talking about the latter.
I think I am right in saying that the best way to control volume on a day to day basis, is through the control room volume. On Ctrl Click, this defaults to -20DB (pretty low for me at present). However other sources say set Control Room volume to 0.0 dB which is conmsiderably louder. After the signal leaves Cubase I have other options, on my system at least. I can alter the master volume on my Focusrite 18i20 (thrd gen), I can alter at my vintage amp. If I pump things too much at my amp I get a hiss. If I leave Cubase control Room at -20db, its not audible enough for comfort.
Which is teh best way to handle this please ?
The volume setting in Control Room is basically like a volume knob on an external amplifier or on speakers.
It doesn’t change the level of the project as such and is there entirely for your listening comfort.
Set it to whatever level is convenient for you and your ears.
Anybody saying that this volume parameter needs to be set to a fixed level (be it 0dB or -20dB) has not understood in the slightest how this works.
I think this question is about the volume coming out of the speakers, rather than gain staging.
This seems to me to be the only sensible answer.
My answer is that there is no one answer. I see a lot of studios with multiple sets of monitors, a mix sounds different at low levels compared to high, etc, etc. Just as one should listen to a mix on a variety of speakers, so listening volume should vary. I mix at comparatively low levels, but I listen at very high levels (high enough to drive my wife from the room). Each to his own.
Well, assuming for a second that your master is going to be louder than your mix, what I would do if I were you is
probably set the CR volume knob to unity” (“0.0 dB”).
I would turn the gear outside of Cubase down so it’s not loud when I press play and I would play a mix that wasn’t mastered. While playing it back I would gradually turn the level up on my gear until it’s as loud as I want it to be for the type of music it is.
Next I would import a master that I think sounds great and make sure the track is at unity. I would turn down the CR meter this time, quite a bit, and then gradually increase it until it’s as loud as I want it to be. Then I would set that as my reference level in preferences.
You now have two options: Set the control room volume knob to 0.0/unity for mixing, or select “reference” to lower it for mastering. When “reference” is chosen the output level will be lower so it should be natural to do things in the mastering stage to make it louder. Conversely when the level is at unity it would be more suited for mixing.
Control room is for controlling listening, Tapping sounds from the bus but not infecting it.
Mix consol is for controlling mixing .
They are separate things
That’s not what this topic was about but for clarity - dB is an expression of ratio between two values. +4dB doesn’t mean much on its own for example but I assume you’re talking about +4dBu (around 1.228 Vrms) used on pro audio equipment vs the -10dBv (around 0.316 Vrms) for consumer equipment.
0dBVU would typically equate to -18dBFS depending on equipment calibration.
Over the years, and due to listening fatigue, I use a dB meter like the Radio Shack one. It even mounts on a tripod. It’s also very handy for discovering cancellation areas in your room.
80 to 90 is normal for composing. But I’ll also listen at very quiet levels too.
For finalizing, it’s all over the place.
For mastering, I prefer to outsource that work to a fresh set of ears in an engineered listening environment.
As @Johnny_Moneto and others said - whatever suits you at the end of the day.
Following @Greg_Purkey 's suggestion, a dB meter is a good idea to get a general idea during mixing/mastering. You can also download a free app for your phone to get the ballpark idea - very helpful and you will have a pretty good idea where you are at after using it for a while.
Keep in mind that the human ear perceives frequencies differently depending on the sound pressure level (look up Fletcher Munson Curves from the 1930s , still valid today).
Here’s what I do:
Most of the time I work at levels between 50dB to 70 dB.
I use low levels (down to 45dB) to check the transients of kick/bass and how the main ingredients of a mix push through. Here, I also check for intelligibility.
I use higher levels to hear if the the 1 to 4k region is too dominant and how the balance between kick and bass works out. Usually, I never go higher than 85 to 90dB.
In my experience: if a mix sounds good and energetic at lower or medium levels it will most likely sound good at higher levels. Not necessarily the other way round.
But let’s not forget: each to their own
Ah, and switiching between levels is good practice!
I got my answer to my original question, which was not about gainstaging. I do gainstage, but never theoretically, only with actual sounds in from of me.
Yet I am interested in this question of headroom. Bear in mind I am 86.42 percent musician 0.3 percent engineer and the rest is completely unkown.
I would love to understand headroom better.
Aurally, I think headroom is a feeling of their being space in the upper partials. I think of clouds in the sky. Lack of headroom is everything crunched in like being on a tube train in the rush hour. Compression?
I developed another analogy in my head to describe compression. Imagine a bunch of sine waves that occupy a bar or so of music. Now imagine the bar as some kind of conmtainer. I am here imagining a mattress case. Just as a mattress case has springs in it, but is contained, so our bar has sine wave “springs”. Compression is like some big polite posterior, that compresses all the springs. No springs are broken, no springs are poking outside the space, their curves are compromised, or should I say modified, its all a lot more packed in when Big Daddy goes to bed.
I am sorry to say that headroom is not half as artistic or poetic as you describe it.
We are talking about peak levels of the audio signal. Headroom is the distance from the peak level to the point of distortion. On an analog mixing console at some point a form of analog distortion would kick in, on a tape it would be known as saturation. On a digital console it can be either of two things: either where digital distortion (clipping) sets in or simply a virtually defined point, that people agree on but that has no real technical background. The good thing is that in both cases this upper limit is called 0 dBFS.
So, headroom is the distance of the peak level to the mentioned levels.
Instead of peak levels it is not uncommon to use VU levels or RMS levels.
