I recently upgraded from an R-09 to a PCM-M10 for taping, and with it my default format from 24/44.1 to 24/96. I tape a lot of club and small theater rock shows, and even with the bass roll-off utilized I find it necessary to use EQ and/or compression to tame the bass when editing for listening purposes these days. I of course tape line in, low sensitivity, no auto-levels or anything else. I usually have the preamp set at +10dB but the clipping indicator came on during the opening act so I cut it back down to 0 (which still has an inherent +24dB gain). The clipping light never came on after this. I had the levels set between 4 and 5, and the green lights on the deck were mostly constant, sometimes dropping off, indicating that I had levels peaking around -12dB. The resulting recording has no clipping. Using Adobe Audition 1.5 I adjust the recording as I see fit and this brings the peaks down to about -18dB, everything sounds great, just quiet. I normalize the recording to -1dB, the last step BEFORE converting to 16/44.1...and now I can hear a significant amount of clipping. Where did I go wrong, because again, there was no recording before normalizing, and according to the visuals the recording is not even approaching 0dB or above.
Thanks for any help you can provide...