Ask an Acoustic Engineer (me)

[Stycker]

You guys are a wealth of knowledge. I didn't even know that headroom req. was displayed there in the EQ section. Hopefully that means it never popped up so I never saw it. I will be looking from now on. Thank you.

[Jdunk54nl]

You guys are a wealth of knowledge. I didn't even know that headroom req. was displayed there in the EQ section. Hopefully that means it never popped up so I never saw it. I will be looking from now on. Thank you.

Most dsp's shows something similar too. But, this doesn't mean you can't go over 0db on these, it all depends on where do you get 0dbfs. Like I just had an issue with my mids. I may have boosted an area by 12db (trying to make it louder overall instead of boosting 6db and cutting the rest by 6db), this was too much and when I turned the volume up near max, issues were heard and I instantly turned it back down. I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to get away with it or not, so I was careful with the volume and turned it up slowly. It was literally at volume 38 out of 39 max that a problem came about. If it wasn't for an issue like that, I would have left the boost and went on my way. If I was using a adau eval board, I could have gotten around this issue in more creative ways with frequency dependent limiters.

Like helix shows it with anything over the 0 line



and similar for dayton




and jl


and minidsp (this was for my outdoor speakers....may have boosted a bit, set a very steep 48db crossover after, and used the limiters on the minidsp so we can't break the system even at max volume). I wish it was frequency limiters, but I haven't purchased a adau chip eval board for this stuff yet.

[Jdunk54nl]

Also, on the home side of things, Dirac live will cut the overall volume by 10db. This gives it 10db of headroom overall to boost. So if you set a channel gain to say -6db, and boost somethign by 6db, on the graph it will show you went over 0db by 6db. But in reality you are at 0db because you cut everything by 6db. And this would only be true if you were actually driving EVERYTHING to its max output. So the number to the left (currently says 0db) needs to actually read 0db output when you have everything maxed out (and something is actually playing) for all of this to be true.





So the TL/DR version of all of this. Boosting and cutting is much much more complicated than what people make it out to be whether or not its safe to do. This is probably why the general consensus gets to just cut and no boost. You will definitely be safer with that approach, but will loose overall volume.

[Stycker]

I clipped my midbass once by over boosting. Everything was fine until I did a Global EQ with the Virtual channels. I have a drop out at 60 hz. I boosted 60 hz in both regular output and virtual output. Be very careful boosting in Virtual channels.