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Preamp clip for kick drum.


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I remeber rat saying you wouldn't be able to break anything on the board, so clipping the pre should be ok.

 

 

Except for the speakers.

 

Why are beginners fixated on this stuff. IMO, you need to spend a whole lot more time understanding the basics before worrying about an advanced technique of debateable merit.

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Except for the speakers.

 

 

Well, you're not gonna break the speakers if you just turn the fader down.

 

I've done this - it works like a really crude limiter. Sometimes that's what you want, sometimes it's stupid. More often than not, IME, that kind of limiting makes things sound more mushy than punchy, especially . If I had to choose between this and a half-way decent comp, I'd pick the comp.

 

One of the things you gotta remember about Dave Rat's tricks is that he's working with top-level gear, crew, and talent and that tricks that work in his world don't necessarily work at lower levels or are so subtle as to be pointless.

 

Also, FWIW, without watching the video, I'd guess that he's talking about only light clipping, not total obliteration.

 

-Dan.

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Except for the speakers.


Why are beginners fixated on this stuff. IMO, you need to spend a whole lot more time understanding the basics before worrying about an advanced technique of debateable merit.

 

 

His question was will this hurt the preamp. Dave rat said it would not.

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why is it bad for the speakers? (legitimate question) extra harmonics? If you're overloading the preamp but sending it through your big fader resistor I thought it would bring the voltage back somewhere close to normal. It would act like a bad compressor.

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why is it bad for the speakers? (legitimate question) extra harmonics? If you're overloading the preamp but sending it through your big fader resistor I thought it would bring the voltage back somewhere close to normal. It would act like a bad compressor.

 

 

There's a lot of area under the power curve with a heavily clipped signal, and for those who do not power their rigs conservatively (ie. listen too much to the marketing sleeze) could end up unintentionally overpowering their drivers. Especially likely if they don't have enough rig for the gig.

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There's a lot of area under the power curve with a heavily clipped signal, and for those who do not power their rigs conservatively (ie. listen too much to the marketing sleeze) could end up unintentionally overpowering their drivers. Especially likely if they don't have enough rig for the gig.

 

 

I'll add to this and say that most clip lights are based on either current or voltage. Cliping an input signal adds harmonic distortion (all High freq - enough clipping and a sign wave starts to look like a square wave). This is LOTS of added HF information (yes clipping a drum channel gives it compression and extra hf transients that weren't originaly there (this is the basis of how the aural exciter works)). Let's say you have a passive two way box rated at 200 watts and you feed it with a 200 watt amp with an output limiter on. That 200 watts is mostly the burden of the woofer. The tweeter may only be rated at 30 watts. You can easily send 100 watts of HF energy to your tweeter without engaging the limiter in the power amp but your tweeter will still pop like a fuse.

 

It is a useful effect but as agedhorse says, be conservative.

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A lot of tweeters are good for about 15-20 watts of thermal energy as well... beware.

 

The saving grace is that the signal has a generally high peak to average ratio because of repitition duty cycle BUT there's very small thermal inerta in a HF driver's VC so bad things can happen rapidly.

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Andy would adding additional head room between the mixer amp make any difference ?

Just curious since Dave doesn't mention any thing about head room in his video.

 

 

Nope, once the signal's clipped, there's no recovering anything. At that instant your (signal) headroom became ZERO.

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