Some professionals get it but don’t care about misusing the term since everyone else does.Īn example is on any gain-reducing plugin or hardware unit, they’ll often label the output volume as “makeup gain,” which is incorrect but a convention now.įor practical purposes, you can think of gain as volume at the input until you have a deeper grasp on it, that I’ll provide as we continue. The problems are that some people don’t understand gain but think they do.
#Soundbunny or hear or volume mixer full#
It’s an easier way to think about it, but it’s not necessarily the full truth.
These sites just want it to be easier for you to understand, because that makes gain the opposite of volume. Amplitude is measured in voltage, which is a direct corollary to volume. It gets more complicated, dealing with voltage and current in electronics (everything we use to record). That’s what it actually is, despite every other website telling you it’s just “the volume at the input.” Gain is the ratio between the volume at the input and the volume at the output of an electrical circuit. Now, let’s juxtapose that against gain, and the difference should pop out at you based on what I’ve emphasized about volume. Volume happens at the output, making it incapable of affecting audio quality. Even if your speakers begin to distort, the audio signal remains the same. The thing to understand is you can adjust the volume of a sound system and it won’t affect the quality or tone of the audio signal.
There’s more to mention about sound pressure levels (SPL) and sound intensity, but let’s not overcomplicate things for now. The higher the decibels, the louder the sound is. And the volume can be measured on the decibel scale. You can think of a sound system as a set of speaker monitors, headphones, an airplane, a chainsaw, or someone whispering in your ear.Ī “system” in this case can be anything that produces sound. Volume is a measure of the output of an audio system as measured in decibels (dB). You push up the fader on a mixing console and that track gets louder. You turn the knob on your car radio and the speakers get louder. Volume is exactly what you’re probably thinking and used to dealing with.
In the image above we have two knobs right next to each other that seem to do the exact same thing. Keep in mind that both modulate the amplitude of a signal, which translates into a change in loudness. Volume – Understanding Each Separatelyīefore we can effectively compare these two properties of audio, we need to make sure we understand what each is separately. Let’s jump right in so you can apply these lessons to your mixes and recordings, pronto. Fortunately it’s a piece of cake.Ī result of getting it right is higher resolution recordings with lower noise floors, more clarity, more headroom, and a cleaner and greater dynamic range in regards to amplitude. The sound of changing either might seem identical to you now, and maybe that’s true if you’re dancing in an acceptable range of gain.īut there are a lot of various components in your signal path, whether analog or digital, that can go haywire if you don’t understand the effect of gain versus how volume works. They both make audio louder when you increase them. To the untrained mind, they seem like they’re the same. At some point, no matter if you’re learning to record music, be a mixing engineer, toying with your first guitar pedals, you’ll be asking the question “What’s the difference between gain and volume?”
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