Topic: Recorders with iriver style "safety clip"

[firmdragon]

Are there any recorders on the market right now that have the iriver style "safety clip" feature?  Basically an option where if your recording is starting to clip and has constant gain, the gain will automatically decrease until there is no more clipping?

[sunjan]

Tascam DR-5, if the specs are correct...
Actually, all recorders that are able to run Rockbox does the safety clip, but there aren't really any serious candidates (all inferior to the 1x0/3x0 series).

[fmaderjr]

I never tried it when I owned a Korg MR-1, but it might be possible to set up it's auto gain control to pretty much do this. You can make many changes as to how the auto gain control works and I know you can set it to never increase the gain and to decrease the gain if it reaches a threshold that you specify (say-2 dB).

Unless anyone knows the answer to this, it would probably take a bunch of testing to see if it would work in practice. It could avoid clipping and still be very audible where it is reducing gain. I t wasn't worth my time because with 24 bit, I just allowed for a good bit of headroom and didn't have to worry about the levels possibly going over 0dB.

[earmonger]

If I understand what you're asking correctly, the Sony PCM-M10 has this function, called Limiter.

From page 44 of the manual:

During the stop or recording mode, you can
set the LIMITER function.
When the “LIMITER” is set to “ON,” the
input sound that is too loud is adjusted
automatically to the maximum input level
to prevent sound distortion.

http://ws.sel.sony.com/PIPWebServices/RetrievePublicAsset/StepID/SEL-asset-177805/original/PCM-M10%20Manual.pdf

[fmaderjr]

If I understand what you're asking correctly, the Sony PCM-M10 has this function, called Limiter.

From page 44 of the manual:

During the stop or recording mode, you can
set the LIMITER function.
When the “LIMITER” is set to “ON,” the
input sound that is too loud is adjusted
automatically to the maximum input level
to prevent sound distortion.

http://ws.sel.sony.com/PIPWebServices/RetrievePublicAsset/StepID/SEL-asset-177805/original/PCM-M10%20Manual.pdf

No, safety clip turns down the record level setting to prevent distortion and never raises it back up.  A limiter tries to temporarily reduce gain to prevent distortion and then, when the signal gets quieter, the limiter releases and the levels go back to however your record level is set.