Floating Point?

[Rick Sanchez]

I was doing a bounce of a 5.1 stem of orchestra in ProTools and had to lower the level of all tracks. After doing this, I noticed severe degredation of the sound quality, very noticable in the midrange. In the past, I've always done my mixing at unity on the ProTools using either a Digital or Analog console for level control, eq, etc. Another engineer informed me that not using floating point convertors in the DSP could account for this. Any input on this issue would be appreciated. Does Digi use floating point convertors, if not, are there plans for this?

[DigiTechSupt]

Digi does not use floating point processing but it shouldn't affect your mix in the way you describe either way.

There have been lengthy discussions here on the DUC about floating point processing and the Digidesign mixer, my suggestion is to do a search on those topics for more info since they have been covered extensively already.

The symptoms you describe are not common to Pro Tools in general but could be particular to your system.

Things that could contribute to this could be..

- Routing. Depending on how you have your mix routed in Pro Tools different levels can affect different plugins differently. Compression for example, can behave differently on audio with different levels especically if any side chaining is being done. Same applies for limiting and gating plugins.

Also plugins on the master fader may behave differently if the entire mix level has been increased or decreased.

With this in mind, try creating a new session with no plugins or routing and try the level changes to see if the problem still exists.

Let me know if any of this helps or not...

Jon Connolly
Digidesign Product Specialist

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[Rick Sanchez]

Thanks Jon, I'll check it out. I don't believe that we were using any plugins on this particular session, but I'll look at the other posts, and try and re-create the problem.

Rick