What is the point of gain staging?
Gain staging is a fairly hot (pun excused) topic in online audio forums today.
What is gain staging?
Gain staging is the management of levels throughout a signal chain. In the analogue world, it's ideal to feed each processor it's nominal level to keep the signal clean of saturation whilst preserving a decent signal-to-noise ratio. In the digital world however, those rules don't necessarily apply.
So when it comes to digital (In-The-Box / In-The-Computer), there are basically two schools of thought:
It doesn't matter because of floating point (~infinite headroom)
It does matter because of reasons that include workflow and non-linear plugins
Technically, neither are wrong. They are both ground in facts.
However, someone new to all of this will encounter problems that they can't navigate because they never learned gain staging in the first place. For example, they may be confused as to why the compressor is completely pegged, not knowing it's because there is too much input gain going in. Without knowing the principles in the first place, how would we know to resolve that issue?
So, for me, it boils down to the same principles that we should all adopt in music which is....
Learn the rules and know when to break them
In the context of gain-staging, this means that you should learn it, but you won't need to deploy it religiously in every project. Sometimes you want to drive more than nominal level into your favourite analogue-modelling plug-ins as to achieve that sound. That's why you bought it in the first place!
To learn more about gain staging, check out this blog from SoundOnSound Magazine.
