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So I was in the studio last night, trying to do serious work..... For the past 2 plus years I've been working on my recordings trying to bring them up to broadcast quality.... treated the room.... some nice gear and new condenser mics and preamps..... but overall I was somewhat unhappy with the output of my sessions in the final mixes..... always felt like there was all this noise in the tracks that accumulated to make a muddy mix...Anyway, last night, I had this awful hissy hummy noise coming through the mic just sitting there in the quiet.... so I started to play with all the filter switches and leveling faders,...... then I found a "knob" on the expander gate that when I turned it up it cut the hiss and the hum and cleaned the signal to near perfect, plus was doing the correct things it needed to do for compression and limiting..... I wound up with a vocal take that had me growing wings and flying it was so good without the noise.......So for the past 20 months, I've been using the mics to record acoustic guitars and vocals in stereo configurations.....plus all the vocals..... and never was able to eliminate all that noise..... the upside is that I found a magic knob in my gear that trims the hiss and humm out and will give me nice clean signals and hopefully get me over the broadcast Q wall I've been trying to climb..... The downside is that I will have to go back and re-record EVERYTHING!!!...... every track and every song... to see if I can get them up to the TAXI standard and pass the bar.... I guess there are a lot of points to this story.... one is that it took two years of practice with the system before I found this one "knob" and I still don't fully understand why it does what it does and why it works..... two.... is when I read through the Sweetwater or AMS catalog and see all those high end DAW software packages and accompanying gear configurations..... plug-ins... virtual gear.... I get truly daunted..... It seems like that you could wind up in a nasty black hole of knobs faders and switches never knowing where to start..... that seems to give weight to a KISS principle in growing into your home recording system..... third.... even though I have to redo a lot of recordings from the past 5 years.... I kept good charts and records..... and even some usable backup files of the drum parts and synth tracks.... and playing all those tracks the second time over doesn't seem as difficult as the first run..... Just thought I'd throw this out there for those of you who are building your systems.....ArkJack

Quote: the upside is that I found a magic knob in my gear that trims the hiss and humm out and will give me nice clean signals and hopefully get me over the broadcast Q wall I've been trying to climb..... The downside is that I will have to go back and re-record EVERYTHING!!!...... AJ. What is your setup? There should be one of those magic knobs in your DAW that might fix all of your other tracks. Many of us 'round here know exactly what that knob does, but without more info it's unclear if you were initially expanding and bringing up the noise floor, or if now you are gating and just cutting it out. Aub

I hope I can lucidly describe the setup....Condenser mics..... AT2020, MXL 660, RODE NT1A...... xlr to Presonus TubePre..... (20db pad, 80HZ filter set to on...) xlr out from pre to DBX 166XL compressor Limiter xlr in.... DBX xlr outs to Boss BR 1600 or 864 xlr ins.... effects on BR units turned off.... When I turned up the Expander gate threshold and release knobs, it made the fuzz in the signal from the chain disappear... t'was a beautiful thang...... I never tried it before because it doesn't look right.... turning the knobs mentioned make the DBX light up red indicators like a firetruck ...... your explanation is helpful in understanding what I did.... please expound and tell me more...ArkJack

Hi ArkJack,The gear you have should be pretty quiet, I was wondering why you were getting a lot of noise from it so I have a couple of questions for you:Did you have the 20dB pad engaged (on)? If you're recording acoustic sources that aren't loud (loud like snare drums) then you might not need to have that pad on. What might be happening is you're cranking up the output of your preamp and 166xL to make up the gain that you should have gotten up front right after the mic. If you turn off the 20bB pad, you make the input more sensitive and thus don't have to crank it up as high to get signal, which means your signal is now much louder than the noise from all the other components. Don't know if this makes sense but you've basically killed all the gain from your mic and have to make it up on the back end, thus amplifying all the noise in everything else just to get a good signal to your recorder.Hope this helps!Mazz

I just love magic knobs.... too many jokes running thru my head, too many jokes!!!! Make it stop!! cb