Peak meter discrepancy: ADAT bridge vs. digital mixer

[Philthy]

Setup: ADAT bridge optical into a Behringer 3216 digital mixer.

Doing some hot mixes with TC|MasterX on the master fader, hitting it hard, but with no peaks registering on the PT master fader "LED's."

However, on the channel meters of the 3216 for the two optical input channels of the main output from ProTools, it's riding into the red.

Now, I have no way of seeing "past" a digital peak so I can't tell if this is simply a difference of digital 0 in ProTools not hitting the LED while the Behringer is designed to show it as a peak.

Does anyone know how to deal with this question?

[Aquarius]

Hi Philthy,

My advice would be : don't squash levels just to feel it's hotter or better or whatever nicer ; This serves nobody, neither you by misjudging the overall quality of your work, the dynamics and overall balance of the instruments, nor your clients by "fooling" their ears.
BUT, if it's your way to go, don't trust thoses cheap meters but invest in a true digital peak meter, which shows digital "over" clips in a consecutive way like DK Audio or the excellent Radical3 plug from SpectraFoo.

And remember People DO have volume knobs on their consumer amp.... [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[Philthy]

Thanks for the advice. These clients like their mixes loud and in this particular case so do I.

By the way TC|MasterX does a fine job of showing consecutive overs.

Anyway, back to my original question, which was a practical question concerning hardware.

Anyone know how to troubleshoot this descrepancy? Is there a particular specification that I should look for in the documentation concerning various digital pieces? It seems to me that digital peak meters should be consistent from box to box. Is there something about the ADAT spec that I don't know?

[Kim G. Rasmussen]

There's no standard, so you'll have to check the documentation.
"Usually", cheaper digital mixers don't count "overs", they just indicate 0dBfs or -0.05dBfs as overload. (Or something in that area)

Kim.