Monday, March 2, 2020

Gain Staging: What It Is and How to Do It

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/gain-staging-what-it-is-and-how-to-do-it.html

Gain staging—a term that baffles many beginners. It’s the kind of phrase people throw around at producer parties (mixing mixers?) as though they know what it means. Often they don’t.

Even if I threw down a prosaic definition of gain staging—say, “adjusting the level at each point of amplification to ensure an optimal signal-to-noise ratio, without unwanted distortion”—it might only confuse you, especially if you didn’t understand the building blocks of that definition.

So in this article, we’ll cover those building blocks. Furthermore, we’ll cover a modern approach to gain staging, one that defies the analog rules of yesteryear.