"Mike Rivers" wrote in message news:znr1089372732k@trad...

In article writes:

I guess I'm headed for a music store to play with a Finalizer. I would
have thought not, but the 'soft limit' indicator was definitely flashing
with some transients.

"Soft limit" is just a euphamism for compression with a fairly high
threshold and fairly high ratio, so it indeed starts working before
reaching full scale.

I think I'm gonna' be sick. This is probably the worst mistake I have
made in years. I'm beating myself silly over not being able to hear
this on-site.

Sure, I may have been impaired by altitude, but I had two days prior to
the mix dates to acclimate. Or by the mix environment? Maybe, but
I can't easily blame this... I had his Dynaudios, my Tannoys, my head-
phones, and I've mixed plenty of decent stuff in bedrooms and patios.
Even though you could hear some reflections in the control room as
you spoke, it's still tough to want to lay the blame there.

I'm really beating myself severely for listening to *anything* that the person
in charge had to say about *any* of the gear. A two-buss limiter before
a hard disk recorder(?)... I had no problem with that, at least with an
analog limiter.

I foolishly did not take the time to examine the damned Finalizer's lot of
parameters after *finally* getting our tracks to play back logically. I guess
I was looking for a reason to move on, and the owner's word was still
enough for me at that point. Maybe he didn't understand my questions.

By the time we were dealing with the Finalizer, the owner had probably
spent a little over 90 minutes with us, and it was 4:00pm on day one...
I suppose I *wanted* to believe him. Couple this with my anxiety and
the need to see something happen, and I may have constructed the
very trap that plagues me now... A simple cough-cough limiter.
How could a 2-buss limiter hurt me? I'd never, or rarely, ever hit it.
Or so I thought........ Bad, bad move.

But with guys like Bob Katz acknowledging that a
Finalizer isn't all that bad if you use it correctly (he wrote a book
about it for t.c., possibly downloadable from their web site) I guess
it's tolerable.

I never knew what it was capable of, and I'll never know what it was that
we were allowing to happen to the music - other than what can be seen
by visual examination and aural scrutiny. "Bypass" should no doubt have
been my choice given my inexperience with the gear.

Still, unless the monitors were connected to the analog output of the
console (I think you said they came off the Masterlink) you should
have been monitoring whatever the Finalizer was doing. So that points
to the monitoring system.

Quite honestly Mike, I could never get behind the console to really see
what the physical routing actually was. I could only experiment with routing
paths within the console and assumed that if I heard something on what
was supposedly an analog input, then it was likely analog. In the control
room cue system however, I ran across no ability to select the sources
for the 2-track monitor returns. So, I really don't know if they were analogue
or digital... I just pushed the button for the playback source and listened.

I just don't have a good grip on how much, if any, of this mess should
actually fall on my shoulders.

Unfortunately, as a business deal, probably most of it.

Tough call. :-(

Maybe we should talk about that.

--
David Morgan (MAMS)
http://www.m-a-m-s DOT com