I recently switched back to a T112 surface from a Digico SD8 on the show I do. I had a problem when I opened up my vocal channels there was excessive amount of hiss. After messing about for awhile trying different things I stumbled across the solution. It transpired that if you have the pad in and say use a input gain of 20db it will hiss but if you take the pad out and use input gain of 20db its silent ?
Anyone technical can tell me why that is.
Dave
Applying a pad and then having to gain it up to suit a vocal effectively is adding 20dB of additional (unnecessary) gain to the channel - I’m surprised at the number of guest engineers I have come through who need reminding of that…
Adam Biggs
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have to say the PAD is the devils work on an iLive, try to not use it and all will be loverly[
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Pad is not your friend on any desk unless once you punch it in you are pulling the gain back.
The iLive has tonnes of headroom even above the peak light. There is something like 18dB of headroom even when you trip a peak light so I don’t worry about running things hot on the iLive. Its better to be hot than it is to be running below zero with all the pads in.
If your just tripping the peak lights and you have the gain all the way down then don’t take the step of punching in a pad, you don’t need it and it will just screw your noise floor.
I saw an engineer once who had every single pad button in on an iLive and the amount of hiss was insane.
The pad itself doesn’t cause noise. The problem is that the pre-amp gets noisy at its highest gain settings. The pad cuts 25db from the signal. If you add all that gain back and end up at the upper end of the pre-amp its going to be noisy. Only use the Pad when turning the pre-amp all the way down doesn’t reduce the signal enough. The pre-amps on the iLive are very good and do offer a 55db range. However I find the last 10db too noisy to be really useful.
-d
David Shriver
Director of Technical Operations
Email: david@rockportmusic.org
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