ABSTRACT
Level Controls and Meters Adjusting and monitoring the strength of your audio signal is at the heart of the sound recordist’s craft. The term levels refers to the strength of your audio as it enters the recorder and the degree to which we boost or lower that audio with manual level controls, sometimes called gain controls or pots (short for potentiometers). This adjustment determines the strength of the audio signal recorded and is called setting levels. On professional recorders
you will have one level control for every microphone channel, allowing you to adjust the levels of each microphone independently. Setting levels is aided by a peak reading meter (Figure 16-3). The peak meter is a highly sensitive instrument that has a one-to-one level correspondence with all sounds entering the recorder. In other words, it reacts to and measures every sound. This allows the recordist an accurate indication of absolute peak levels in any recording situation. Each mike input will have its own corresponding peak meter. Meter displays can be quite different from machine to machine, including pivoting needles, colored LED lights, or backlit LCD displays, but they are all calibrated in decibels that run from dB on the extreme low end, through 40, 30, and 20 dB, and so on, to 0 dB on the high end. At dB there is no signal at all and you will record no sound. If your signal strength exceeds 0 dB your audio is too strong and will become distorted. We will discuss recording techniques and using gain controls and meters in detail in Chapter 17.
