Bottom mixing

[back_ache]

Through the years, now and again, I've seen a dodgy technique for feedback suppression that to my mind shouldn't work and should sound awfull.

 

Basically they mix by whacking the master to maximum and mixing by keep the channel faders down at not much more than zero.

 

Now, before I get flamed, I would never do it, think the gain structure would be all wrong and think there would potentialy be quite a high noise floor.

 

However I have come across a few people that have sworn by it and has left me wondered how it could possibly work, the only thing I could come up with is some kind of gating effect from having the channel sliders so low.

 

so it's and awful technique and should sound awful, but it if it did work, how could it.

 

Please put me out my misery!

[Bobbsy]

I was originally going to say that there's no technical reason at all for this to work...but then had a thought.

 

If you're driving the mic preamps into clipping, that will, in effect, be hard limiting your signal at that point. It'll be the worst SOUNDING limiter ever, but it will be knocking off your peaks.

 

Other than that, this is clearly a stupid idea, used by people who don't know what they're doing.

 

Bob

[GreyBadger]

Sounds like the concept of unity gain needs to be knocked into these muppets' heads.