Do I have this right?
Here’s the scenario: AEA R88 ribbon into a Grace m108 mic preamp into the SQ via a Dante patch. Even with the very nice Grace, the gain needed to drive the R88 at reasonable levels during a live broadcast will make the signal noisy. If I run the Grace at a noise-free level and use the preamp trim to get more gain, will I avoid adding noise to the signal? As I understand, the trim in the SQ is digital gain.
Could eliminate my need for in-line boosters, which I mostly hate, or renting a specific ribbon preamp like AEA’s The Ribbon Pre.
Thanks for any thoughts.
D.
First, if you are sending the console a digital signal (via Dante in this case), there is no analog preamp (gain) available because the signal is already in a digital format. This means the first chance you will get to alter the gain level of the incoming digital signal is at the channel’s digital trim. Therefore your two main choices to boost the Grace’s signal will be either an inline booster, or the channel’s digital trim control in the console.
Any sort of “boosting” of the Grace’s output signal is going to result in an increase of the noise floor too. It doesn’t really matter if it’s done via an in-line booster or the digital trim in the console. All of those methods of boosting apply to the entire audio signal, not just a portion.
If the Grace’s preamp level is set such that there is little to no “noise”, then when you boost the signal it will boost a mostly clean signal. Whatever noise is present in the Grace’s output will still be magnified, but if it is low enough it probably still won’t be noticeable when boosted.
Long story short, yes you can use the channel’s digital trim level to boost/cut the audio level of the ribbon mic (up to +/- 24db of gain). That being said, gain staging with the Grace is going to be very important and it will probably take some experimentation to find out the right combination of the Grace’s preamp gain setting vs the console’s digital trim setting to provide the lowest overall noise floor that offers enough total gain to work in your situation.
Thanks Brian. That’s sorta what I thought.
And I understand that the signal into the board via Dante is strictly digital. But I also know that both the SQ’s preamp gain and the trim will raise the level of the signal coming from the Grace. Since they are both raising a digital signal, is there any preference about which control I use to affect the change?
D.
It seems with the SQ that if you have a digital input, the preamp gain knob automatically changes to control the digital trim. So while there might be two ways to adjust the trim, I think it is actually changing the exact same setting. Therefore it really doesn’t matter which method you use to change the digital trim control.
Bear in mind, A - if you’re coming in Dante, there’s not preamp control on the desk.
Yes, the digital trim can be used, and it will not add any noise of it’s own. However, it will definitely bring up the preexisting noise floor up, at the same proportion as the signal, so you’ll really want that optimised as much as possible before you hit Dante