[KonradParticipant]

Thanks for the quick reply and the link to the gain staging document.

@volounteer, I am not new to digital. I’ve been working on digital consoles for more than 25 years and almost exclusively in the digital domain since 1994. I understand that 0dBFS is an absolute during A/D & D/A conversion and when outputting a digital signal via AES or Dante, But most digital consoles allow for signal greater than this by using either floating point processing or fixed point with an accumulator. That way internal clipping is avoided. This is easily tested as I described in my original post. On a Behringer X32 which uses 40 point float, You can combine something like 32 channels of 0dBFS tone without clipping the internal mix bus. On a Yamaha DM2000 which uses 32 bit fixed with a 56 bit accumulator, you can combine 8 channels of 0dBFS tone before the internal mix bus clips. (of course in both cases the master fader has to be pulled down to -20 or greater to prevent clipping the 24-bit output).

Do I understand correctly that the SQ does not have this additional headroom?

[KonradParticipant]

I recently got an SQ 6 to check out and my tests seemed to indicate that it does not have any headroom and clips internally at 0dBFS. I did two tests, detailed below. Source was Pro Tools at 96 kHz via Dante. Result were confirmed by recording the L/R output fo the SQ back into Pro Tools.

1. 20 – 40k sine tone sweep at -10dBFS. Input to channel 1, channel fader at unity. Master fader at -20. Did a 12 dB boost at 230 Hz, Q of 0.5. The sweep clipped, the red clip light on the EQ lit, and I could audibly hear clipping on the output even though the master fader was at -20.

2. 400 Hz sine tone at 0 dBFS, multed to channels 1 – 8 on the console. All 8 faders at unity. Master fader at -20. With only one channel unmuted the tone sounds clean, adding in a second channel, the tone is pushed into clipping and audibly clips at the output even though the master fader was at -20.

This does not seem right, at least not for a modern digital console. But I am new to the SQ and perhaps something was set strangely on the demo unit? What am I doing wrong?

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