I recently got a mixer for work stuff but honestly I don’t really know how to use it, HELP
In: Engineering
Gain is the control of the first stage of the amplifying process that can be increased to saturate (signal larger than the next stage can handle) the following stage. This saturation causes clipping and distortion. The volume controls the entire amplifier chain and does not cause overdrive/distortion giving a clear higher volume output.
Gain is the amount of signal (usually electric signal representing the audio) in the system. Volume usually relates to the sound level coming out of the speakers. You could turn the volume (speakers) down and the gain would be unchanged within the system. If you turned the gain completely down there would be no sound within the system system and turning the volume up would not change this
Think of the mixer like three people working together to translate a message from Spanish to English. Let’s call them Bob, Linda, and Steve.
Linda can read and write in both Spanish and in English, but she can’t actually speak in either language. She learned both of them entirely from books. That’s why she needs Bob and Steve – Bob speaks Spanish and Steve speaks English.
Bob listens to the Spanish message and then writes it down for Linda. Linda writes down the English version of the message, and then Steve reads it out loud. “Volume” tells Steve how loud to say the words. Great, right?
There’s a little problem – Linda only has these little bits of paper to write on, and she always writes letters that are the same size as the ones she’s reading. It’s just part of her process. Her eyesight isn’t that great either – she probably didn’t have enough light when she was doing all that reading. Or maybe she didn’t hold the books far enough away from her face!
Bob is a little weird – the louder the Spanish sounds, the bigger he writes his letters. That’s why Bob has a “Gain” setting.
If the Spanish is REALLY loud, then Bob is going to use HUGE letters. When Linda writes down the English version, it won’t all fit on the paper 🙁 Steve won’t be able to do a good job of speaking the English version, no matter what volume you asked for. Did he just say “I wa to ea Pi”??
If the Spanish is REALLY quiet, then when Bob writes it down for Linda the letters will be TINY, and she won’t be able to read it well with her bad eyesight 🙁 The English message will have lots of mistakes again! Did he just say “I went to leek pieces”??
Bob has to write his message down at just the right size for everything to work right. If there are mistakes, we can use the Gain to ask him to write bigger, or maybe to write smaller, and we just keep messing around with that until the English message comes out sounding right. Oh! He said “I want to eat Pizza”! Why bother translating that? When does anyone *not* want to eat Pizza?! Ugh, what a waste of effort…
It’s hard to articulate without a visual. Gain is how loud an engineer makes the sound, volume is how loud the listener makes it.
Let’s say that the volume of any sound project ranges from 1 to 100. You can’t get louder than 100. If the engineers set the gain to 25, it would be barely audible. If they set it to 99, it would sound super distorted and unlistenable. If a listener heard a project set to 25, they could turn up their volume and still hear it fine. However, if a listener hears something set to 99, it will sound like ass and they won’t be able to hear it clearly no matter what they set their volume to. Hope that makes sense!
You adjust gain on mixer inputs so that (typically)they all have equal volume coming out of the speakers
This is a simple concept yet easy to confuse. We use gain in electronics, mixers and radio. Mostly in cases where you measure in dB. All this is is a ratio. What confuses people is when Power and Volume are compared. In mixing and electronics Gain is the increase in signal tone before it is processed, this can change the signals waveform. Volume adjusts the signal after is processed and does not affect the tone. Distortion in this case comes from the signal strength being amplified before the processor… Gain by itself is just the original tone in relation to its amplification. O dB would be the base point for comparison. Then doubling in Power every 3 dB. If you have a guitar, you apply gain.. the original signal before the processed could start at -15 dB by the time the signal hits the processor, due to system loss the gain would make up for that loss, however over compensation creates distortion. Volume always starts at 0dB and increases in order of magnitude. In RF Gain is merely a ratio in reference to Watts and the power of the Amplification System, it is a similar in how it is quantified but different, but thats another rabbit hole.
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