Reading the scales

[Alt 3-4]

Hi,

I'm doing home studio recording. I've just purchased Har bal and want to practise a bit. for that purpose I've opened an audiofile wich doesn't sound so bad to my ears. I've used a low cut filter round 40 Hz but, maybe due to my monitors (yamaha msp 5) I can hear a little bass resonnance.

This is my problem: I don't know how to read the decibel scale; It shows a graduation from 0 to 6 (usually it's rather negative values)... Does that mean we're up to o Db? On the quick start tutorial , it's been said to low down any yellow peak, round the 3 khz, up to 3 db; But according to the way I'm reading the scale, my whole yellow line, and even the green one too, is up to 3 db: what am I doing wrong?
reading the statistics tells me: -14.87 for the average and - 4.25 for the peak , it seems not so bad but using tne eq parametric cusor and following the whole yellow line, the indicators shows 20, 60 Db ...
Sure I miss something; how to read the scale?

[har-bal]

Hi,

I'm doing home studio recording. I've just purchased Har bal and want to practise a bit. for that purpose I've opened an audiofile wich doesn't sound so bad to my ears. I've used a low cut filter round 40 Hz but, maybe due to my monitors (yamaha msp 5) I can hear a little bass resonnance.

This is my problem: I don't know how to read the decibel scale; It shows a graduation from 0 to 6 (usually it's rather negative values)... Does that mean we're up to o Db? On the quick start tutorial , it's been said to low down any yellow peak, round the 3 khz, up to 3 db; But according to the way I'm reading the scale, my whole yellow line, and even the green one too, is up to 3 db: what am I doing wrong?
reading the statistics tells me: -14.87 for the average and - 4.25 for the peak , it seems not so bad but using tne eq parametric cusor and following the whole yellow line, the indicators shows 20, 60 Db ...
Sure I miss something; how to read the scale?

The vertical scale is in dB so if you want to pull down a particular region by 3dB then you can use the scale as a guide. Probably a better
way to read this is to take note of the values printed in the status bar as your drag your spectrum with the mouse. The actual axis values are reported here to make it easier for you to read. As for what the dB value actually corresponds to, the dB reference 100p = 0.0000001 and that is a power reference (ie. signal squared). That corresponds to a reference of 1/100,000th of full scale. I chose that value so that the dB's would all be positive but in hindsight maybe a full scale sinusoid as 0dB would have been more logical. Maybe I'll change it to that to make it more intuitive.

The final point I'd make is that you can't easily correlate the dB you see in the spectrum with the dB you'll see in your VU meters because what you see in the VU meters is the integral sum of the entire spectrum and not just one point. The case that there'll be a one to one correspondence in the displayed values in each would be for the trivial case of a sine wave, but that doesn't make for very interesting music.

Regards,

Paavo.

[Jay]

...but in hindsight maybe a full scale sinusoid as 0dB would have been more logical. Maybe I'll change it to that to make it more intuitive.

I'd vote for that, Paavo.

Jay

[Alt 3-4]

Thanks for your answer Paavo!
Maybe it would be better to not implemate an absolute change. But giving the user the ability to change between different displays would be nice!