Q Do I need to use a compressor before my soundcard?

Thomas Jay

Excessive dust, smoke and moisture can lead to unreliable patchbay performance. Excessive dust, smoke and moisture can lead to unreliable patchbay performance.

Features Editor Sam Inglis replies: I'm afraid there is no such thing as 'unlimiting'. Once you have applied dynamic processing such as limiting or compression to a signal, there isn't an awful lot you can do to reverse it. However, it's not uncommon to apply multiple stages of compression. Compressing an entire mix is also very different to compressing an individual signal within the mix, both in terms of what you're trying to do and the settings you would use.

Some people like to use a hardware compressor before the A-D converter, if it has a specific 'sound' that they can't get later using plug-ins. However, in normal use, there is absolutely no need to use either a compressor or limiter to 'drive' the A-D converters.

You only need to use a limiter on the way into the soundcard if you are dealing with wildly unpredictable levels and there is a possibility of a rogue peak exceeding the headroom you've left. In general, it would be much better simply to leave more headroom at the input of the A-D converter. The dynamic range of a modern A-D converter is huge, and there is no need to push your input signals anywhere near clipping in order to get good sound quality. So, in short, unless your input signal levels are hugely and widely variable, or you particularly like the sound of the Nanocompressor, I'd simply remove it from the signal chain altogether, and turn the preamp gain down.

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