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Ok, So the other day I was watching Noisia's remix of Earthquake on a spectrum analyzer and Flux stereo tool in Ableton and I noticed that the bass was consistently hitting at -0db? This confuses me considering that I've always heard that -6 is half of your headroom so, theoretically, if the bass is at -0 wouldn't this be all of your headroom gone? and if so, how is it possible for the rest of the song to be as loud as it is with the bass being that loud? This shit is plaguing my head. ... needs insight...GO!

also...I just noticed that it doesn't even look like they roll off the lows with eq or anything. There is a lot of energy below the bass...can anyone explain this as well?

djcainn wrote:also...I just noticed that it doesn't even look like they roll off the lows with eq or anything. There is a lot of energy below the bass...can anyone explain this as well?

Yeah I dont roll off my midrange's either, I design them so any major harmonic content doesnt clash with the sub, and then consider whatever is in between filler/gel/ear-candy.

djcainn wrote:Ok, So the other day I was watching Noisia's remix of Earthquake on a spectrum analyzer and Flux stereo tool in Ableton and I noticed that the bass was consistently hitting at -0db? This confuses me considering that I've always heard that -6 is half of your headroom so, theoretically, if the bass is at -0 wouldn't this be all of your headroom gone? and if so, how is it possible for the rest of the song to be as loud as it is with the bass being that loud?

Dont trust their channel meters, watch their master meter, because that is where DAW's clip... they probably have a clean, colorless gain down as the first stage of the master. OR the channel your seeing could be bussed with numerous other bass sounds, and that bus could be getting turned down... look at the routing of whatever video/mixer you were looking at before you assume its going striaght out at that volume, chances are, its meeting a bus.

[quote="djcainn"]Ok, So the other day I was watching Noisia's remix of Earthquake on a spectrum analyzer and Flux stereo tool in Ableton and I noticed that the bass was consistently hitting at -0db?
This confuses me considering that I've always heard that -6 is half of your headroom so, theoretically, if the bass is at -0 wouldn't this be all of your headroom gone?

Limiting possibly when it was mastered?If they sent it to be mastered i doubt very much it would of gone with no headroom.If you heavily limit a track you take all the dynamics out so pretty much everything hits around 0db.
I am no expert but believe this to be probably what you are seeing.

Yeah I was gonna say, that's a mastered track mate, of course it's gonna be slamming the roof of the db meter, it WAS probably peaking way lower before they got it mastered and then the limiter brought it up to be as loud as possible so naturally most sounds will be close to if not at 0 the whole time (most likely -0.3 but that's semantics).

do you have their stems or what?

RandoRando wrote:do you have their stems or what?

Yeah that would be nice lol.

Read about perceived loudness, and no doubt the tune was mastered by one of the best in the game.

Actually from what i know, Noisia do all their mastering themselves

And to the OP. It's no use to start analyzing mastered tracks this way.
As soon as a track is mastered the volumes are ofcourse not what they where in the DAW.
Thats what mastering does... Bring up the volume to the max

I know its been mastered. And I'm not looking at it on the channel meter either. I know all about proper gain staging and limiting and such but my point is that on ABLETON's SPECTRUM ANALYZER there is a part at 1:25 where the bass frequency (an A or A# I think) peaks at -0.36. Usually, on almost every other song I've saw, the bass frequencies hit at -6. Is this possible because the rest of the sound (90 hz to 15.8 khz ) for that split second is turned down to about -42 or so?

wormcode wrote:...and no doubt the tune was mastered by one of the best in the game.

^these are my thoughts exactly

CyMoRrR wrote:Actually from what i know, Noisia do all their mastering themselves

And to the OP. It's no use to start analyzing mastered tracks this way.
As soon as a track is mastered the volumes are ofcourse not what they where in the DAW.
Thats what mastering does... Bring up the volume to the max

So, is this to say that their bass was hitting at say -6 like everybody elses before it was mastered? Not being a smartass, Im just really curious as to how they made it peak THAT loud lol

When you see a db meter say 0db that is a combination of all the frequencies in the sound hitting that at once. It tells you nothing about the actual energy at various frequencies but only the sum of them all. A spectrum meter or spectrogram will show you how loud various bands are at any given moment. During the limiting process, areas which "ought to" hit above 0db are squashed together in various ways or clipped so that no sample is above 0.

zero is neither negative or positive. its just zero