![]() ![]() When clipping occurs the ‘LED’ will light up red and may remain lit up until you stop recording. It sits at the top or end of the level meter. In this situation, you are driving your preamps too hard, and you should reduce the level considerably. If the meter is fully lit up and appears static even the lows in your audio are louder than your audio gear or DAW can cope with. Once the level is in the red you are in the danger zone close to audio clipping. When in the yellow (or amber) you are still OK but watch out. If the level displayed on the meter is in the green you are safe. Usually, it goes from green to yellow to red. In this extreme case, significant digital distortion will occur. The wave profile will then look as if the highest parts have been sliced-off flat. If you are driving too much signal into your mic pre-amps the audio may remain clipped for longer. If occasionally the peaks touch the top/bottom reduce your input level to avoid any further clipping. You should have some “headroom” above the peaks of your audio (the top/bottom of the waveform in the display). Keep an eye on the audio waveform profile. When recording audio directly into your DAW you will be presented with visual information that will allow you to judge whether any clipping is taking place. Typical mic Pads will drop the microphone output by 10 or 20dB. This is useful when recording extremely loud sources since the Pad can help reduce the chance of clipping. So, condenser microphones often include a Pad or attenuator switch to help prevent overdriving the mic-preamp. Dynamic mics typically have lower outputs than condenser mics. Microphones can also vary in the amount of signal they feed into your audio interface or camera. This allows recording from either a microphone or an audio mixing desk. Some cameras, such as the Canon XF100, have switchable inputs. Obviously, “line level” and “microphone level” signals will not match and cause problems. The voltage of microphone level is typically in the order of millivolts, whereas “line level” will be around 1 volt. But if you are feeding in “line level”, your recording equipment will be overloaded. Your audio interface or video camera may be expecting microphone level. If you have turned down your input levels and all your audio is still clipping, along with noticeable distortion, you may be feeding the wrong type of level into your recorder. This potentially can lead to digital distortion. But if you set your input levels much too high you may find that all the audio peaks are clipped. Headroom is that safe margin you should leave between your audio peaks and the 0dBFS maximum that you can record.Ī lack of headroom may result in your highest peaks being clipped. In doing so, you have run out of headroom in your recording equipment. If your audio is clipping, you are overloading your audio interface or recording device. It effectively becomes a square wave, and the result is harsh distortion. With digital clipping, the peaks are chopped off the smooth sine wave. ![]() As the input level increases the peaks get higher until they reach 0dBFS on our digital meter. To illustrate what I mean, think of a beautifully smooth sine wave. Whatever the original signal, that data will be lost and the audio will be clipped. Īll levels that are higher than 0dBFS on our meter will saturate to our maximum sample value of 32,767. Simply put, we have run out of zeros and ones to describe the input signal. Those extra samples are not available in 16-bit audio, so our input overloads the digital recorder.Īll that extra information about the input signal will be lost because when we hit the maximum sample value. 65,534, to record all the information about the louder audio signal. We would need twice the sample value, i.e. The 32,767 samples are enough to describe the audio.īut say we double the input signal by turning up the microphone gain. ![]() Up to this point, we can record all the information about the input signal. This will be the situation when our input has reached 0dBFS on a digital meter. Assuming the recording is a 16-bit audio file, the largest sample value we can ascribe is 32,767. In digital audio, we have a limited range of sample values to represent the audio signal. If you already have some clipped audio, I will also explain what you can do to fix audio clipping at the end of this article. But more importantly: I’ll explain what you need to do to ensure you avoid clipping your audio and never again end up with a distorted and useless recording. In this article, I will show you how to tell if your audio is clipping. You can easily prevent audio clipping by just using your eyes and the meter on your recorder. You’ve just finished recording your latest video and you play it back and instead of hearing pristine audio, everything is too loud and messed up.
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