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Gear / Technical Help => Recording Gear => Topic started by: floete on November 01, 2006, 09:01:44 AM
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My r-09 is on the way back to Roland for a look-see into my recent input-level woes, but it occurred to me this morning to ask my betters here what, in the case of the r-09, automatic gain control might be used for? i know it's *supposed* function -- to capture sources that might be both near and far, as in an interview situation with people talking from different distances. as far as that goes, within its very limited parameters, the agc in my $35 sony tape recorder does a great job. as far as i recall from my early look at agc on the r-09, however, it sucked beyond words, or at least it reduced the recording capability to less than my sony, as i recall. i haven't experimented with it since that early disappointment. but i'm wondering: is there any way to make it better? is it just an on/off setting with no other options available in the menu? i'd look myself but as i say my unit is in the mail. thanks for any thoughts you might have!
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My understanding with AGC was simply that it limited and adjusted if the rec'ing threatened to peak - does it also boost low frequencies? I've never used it on anything (for what I do it would be obtrusive and without cmopression will simply result in a very misleading representation of the sound of my voice).
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My r-09 is on the way back to Roland for a look-see into my recent input-level woes, but it occurred to me this morning to ask my betters here what, in the case of the r-09, automatic gain control might be used for? i know it's *supposed* function -- to capture sources that might be both near and far, as in an interview situation with people talking from different distances. as far as that goes, within its very limited parameters, the agc in my $35 sony tape recorder does a great job. as far as i recall from my early look at agc on the r-09, however, it sucked beyond words, or at least it reduced the recording capability to less than my sony, as i recall. i haven't experimented with it since that early disappointment. but i'm wondering: is there any way to make it better? is it just an on/off setting with no other options available in the menu? i'd look myself but as i say my unit is in the mail. thanks for any thoughts you might have!
Look at AGC this way, if it really worked sound engineers like my self would be looking for a new job.
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I have long thought that a fairly ideal AGC would be two stage. The first stage would apply fast acting compresion to prevent peaks from reaching 0dB. The second stage would work very slowly in either direction to keep the level at the point where compression is zero. Working together, they should give you a decent hands off level set routine.
Sadly, this is not possible in the R-09 since the AGC is built into the DSP and has a maximum time constant of something around 1 second. Adequate for compression but way too fast for AGC in my opinion.
Paul
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ah well just as i thought. i was hoping that somehow it'd be useful for voice recordings. my early experiments suggested not -- not at all -- and i guess i was right.
one thing i'm going to do is look for a device to have running as backup to the edirol. i'm thinking of maybe an iriver of some kind ... but i'll post about that separately.
thanks for weighing in.