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Date: 01-Oct-09 @ 11:25 PM -
Levels/gain problems
hey,
This is my first post, apologies if it's a very obvious issue -- googling hasn't managed to turn up anything useful.
I have a Behringer mx1604a mixer, whose main outputs are connected to a pair of Yorkville ysm1p monitors. My problem is, stuff is either way too loud or way too quiet, and I suspect I'm doing something wrong in terms of setting up the levels.
The mixer can output either +4dB or "mic" (the manual doesn't specify what level this is). The monitors have trim knobs adjustable between -6 and +9 dB.
With the mixer at +4, the levels are wayyyy too high -- even with the monitors trimmed to -6dB, and the faders for both the channel the audio's coming through and the main set to around -30dB, thing are painfully loud. And yet, only the bottom 1-2 LEDs on the mixer's meter things are lit up (-20 to -30dB)! This seems obviously wrong.
With the mixer at "mic" setting, things seem much more reasonable -- I can set the monitor trim and faders all to 0dB and things are at a moderate volume, with the mixer's meter staying around -10. This seems more correct to me
BUT: with the mixer output at "mic" level, I can't crank things up very loud. Even if I turn up the monitor trim to +9 and the faders to max (+10), things are only at around 0 on the meter, and it's nowhere near as loud as it can be when the mixer is outputting at +4. Plus, it seems wrong to have the mixer outputting at mic levels, when this was only intended to allow you to feed its outputs into another mixer's mic ins.
So: what would be the best settings to use in order to optimize s/n ratio and headroom and all that good stuff? It seems to me that there should be a way to have the mixer's meter showing the levels at 0db when the faders, monitor trim, etc are all at 0db.. but possibly this is stupid and I'm crazy.
Should the monitors be hooked up to the control room outputs rather than the main outs? (they're my only speakers so I'm guessing no). The primary sources of audio are my computer and my Virus TI, both of which are plugged into the line-in channels; should I be using the mic/line channels instead? That would give me an input trim on the mixer.. would that be useful?
Thanks for your time, sorry about the rather verbose problem.. hopefully this is just a case of me being a n00b
Raigan