With that way you don’t affect the signal that plugins take. A nice method is to make your gain staging so that every sound is close to -18 rms, so you make sure every plugin in chain accepts this level and in the end of chain to apply a trim plugin like Graham says and to make a rough mix with trim plugins. What would be an issue is the structure in plugins. Before somebody jumps and tell me the lower is loosing resolution, you can download free SSL X-ism plugin and you will see even the one peaking (not rms) in -18 or even less, still preserves 22-23bit.
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When you do that in a full mix the mix opens even more. I can guarantee that exist big difference. Fader at -4ĭuplicate one more channel and adjust with trim pre fader to peak in -18. Now duplicate this channel and adjust with trim pre fader to peak in -12. Adjust pre fader with trim to peak at -6. Well the difference exist even without plugins. I hope that I helped to clarify a little. You’ll find out that the sound integrity is determined by the gain setting to start with and that faders do not have any influence on the sound itself. You can verify this with an extreme example: Turn up the gain till the signal starts distorting and then try to undo it by lowering the fader. Of course, if the signal is not too critical, and within limits, one can get away with using ones fader to compensate for a inproper gain setting on one single channel, but multiplied by xx channels will definitely result in poor audio quality. The fader has no effect on this as it comes after the fact. Without getting too technical, this ‘appropriate’ level is a level sufficiently above the systems noise floor and far enough below the clipping point (=headroom) and it is set by the gain knob at the point of entry to the channel. If I may the faders are for balancing the relative levels of the channels feeding into the master buss, while the gain is for the appropriate level in the channel itself.