posted 03 May 2002 01:18            

I noticed tonight that playing a recorded sound in the timeline sounds different from playing it directly as a DiskPlayer Sound. On investigating further I noticed that the Timeline attenuates this same Sound by about 4 dB. [I was surprised to hear what a difference only 4 dB makes -- they sounded completely different to me!]

In another test, I put this same Diskplayer in a Timeline track and piped its output through two effects tracks before going to the speakers. Once again it was about 4 dB down. So that tells me that the attenuation is not applied to all Timeline tracks, just those going to the speakers? or just those that are DiskPlayers?

At first I thought maybe Kyma was doing the same thing my mixer board does -- attenuate each track to give a little headroom for mixing. My console attenuates by 2 dB for this purpose. But that does not really seem to be what's happening here.

Any comments or suggestions?

Thanks,

posted 03 May 2002 14:26            

I did some more tests and found that the attenuation only occurs when sound is being sent out to the speakers via the panner control. Not when a specific output channel is selected. Thinking about how the panner works, with radius as one of the variables, I see you need some headroom to accomplish moving the sound closer to the listener. Hence the 4 dB attenuation at radius = 1.

I answered my own question...