Doubling / bounce question

[Jonah]

I have some DAT tracks recorded into PT that are stereo mixes. The volume was a little low so I doubled the stereo track as I didn't want to mess things up by using the gain plug-in or a compressor to bring the levels up.When I created a stereo master fader, the levels went into the red obviously. So I ditched the master fader and bounced straight to disk like that. Great levels.
My question is, why don't I get clipping when I double tracks like this? Could I theoretically keep doubling tracks to increase volume without clipping?

[soundsurfr]

Dang. Interesting question. Bump.

[Calvin]

You always need to have your masterfader. While you can bounce to disk with out having one, it dosen't make any difference. Pro-tools is still summing everything down to 2 tracks. The master fader just allows you to look at the levels and do some quick changes if needed. Here's the deal. Pro-tools itself uses 32 bit floating point calculations that allow you to actually hear signals that go above or is in the normal 24 or 16 bit clipping range. What happens is that pro-tools will give you a ok sound if you go into the normal clipping range shown on the master fader, but when you bounce to disk it will just cut all that information off which will actually result in a thinner sounding wav after bouncing. If you bring up the master fader and can see to bring it down to level where it isn't clipping, you will get a better sounding bounce. There was an article in the digi LE magazine, I can't remember what it is called, that had a guy featured that was sapposed to be the guy to go to to fix your mix. Well anyway he said that the absolute first thing that he does is to go threw the mix and take off any pluggins or anything that would affect the sound and make sure that nothing is clipping because the sound quality suffered when the main buss was clipping, even though you might not notice it. You can't check that with out a master fader.

Always give youself a master fader to see you outgoing levels. just hold alt and click on the fader to set it to the 0 db so that it is neither lowering or upping the sound level.

[Jonah]

Thanks Calvin - that makes perfect sense. Darn - thought I was onto something there!