Topic: Am I using Rockbox AGC correctly?

[stantheman1976]

Here's what I'm doing.  Tell me if I have things straight.

I have a lapel mic plugged into my SP preamp going into my iRiver.  The gain is set to +29dB which is just about right.  I set the max gain to -3dB with AGC Safety Clip on. 

With this setting the levels should go no higher that -3dB in the final recording, right?  I want to be able to drop this in a interviewee's pocket while they are speaking and not worry about levels.

Is there anythign else I should or shouldn't do?

[BayTaynt3d]

Not really. Ideally, if you have a decent preamp, you'd run the iRiver at 0 gain and get all of your gain from the pre instead of the iRiver. However, you have to make sure you don't send too hot of a signal from your preamp to the iriver or you will clip. Although it's a little mysterious, running at negative gain on the preamp doesn't do anything for a clipping input, it just lowers the level but it's still clipped (bricked). It sounds to me like you're really looking more for a limiter, which the iRiver doesn't have. One approach would be to actually use some gain on the iRiver, say +10db and then set it to safety and then run your preamp accordingly (a little lower). This would give you 10 db of headroom (kind of) cause the safety clip could run the gain from +10 down to 0 if it needed to. The downside obviously is the tradeoff of using 10 db of gain from the iriver instead of your preamp -- might be worth it though if you're worried about the interview clipping.

[petur]

Set the iriver gain to maybe +15dB (decide yourself when the noise becomes too high, maybe +20dB is acceptable).
Set AGC to Safety Clip, choose the speed (200ms - 1s, slower times will make it immune to short pops & co)
Leave the max AGC volume alone - that is only for AGC modes that increment gain too.
Now set the pre-amp gain to good levels (not too hot)

[bugg100]

Recently I have been running hotter on my pre (CA st-9100 - 12:00-2:00 oclock on gain knob) and lower on the iRiver.  Like -3/-5 low, this seems to give better bass response.  I was not pleased with the tone of low bass and this seems better tone.  Previously, I was shooting for Unity gain (11:00 gain) and just above 0db (usually 3-8dB) for loud club shows.

Notice how scientific this all is!   It really is time to do some critical listening.....

Joe