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Cubasis - Weird Compression?
I've been using DAWs for a good many years, and recently "graduated" to Cubasis from iPad GarageBand.
I noticed with GarageBand that there seemed to be some kind of compression operating on the output. I was previously used to being able to overdrive the output section of (for example) my E-MU 0404 USB using Sonar, if I just kept adding louder and louder tracks. But with GarageBand there were only eight tracks, and so the issue seldom arose, except that when I would increase the gain on one track I would hear the others appear to fade, but distortion never appeared.
Now I hear a similar, although more pronounced, effect in Cubasis, to the point where softer tracks may almost disappear entirely.
Is there some output compression/limiting happening in hardware here?
The solution in GarageBand seemed to be to reduce the levels equally on all tracks so that the output stage was never taxed. Some more experimentation is required in Cubasis, but I just wonder if anyone knows what is going on at the output stage on the iPad. (It's the iPad 3 I'm using.)
Comments
Hmmmm interesting. i know compression is an option for insert, send and global but you're suggesting there's also an automatic compression as well. Are you getting the red clipping indicator on any on the individual channels or output faders?
@AkaMarko The effect is more pronounced the hotter the total signal path is, so yeah as the meters show more red the more you hear the effect. I've been making sure to leave plenty of headroom and that certainly helps. You can demo the effect very easily. Just get a drum track and a bass track and turn up the bass, and you will hear the drums begin to disappear. Sounds like some kind of bandwidth compression to me rather than a compression on the gain. It is strange, but it could just be my ageing ears!
Haha, your aging ears shouldn't be able to detect subtle audio flaws. ;-)
I'll check it out in the near future and report back.