Cubase 5 Signal Chain Question

[Aceguitar1]

Hello,

It's been a long time since I posted on here, but I have a new question and was hoping to get some help. Up until now, I have only used hardware compressors, so my hardware signal chain would look like: mic-preamp-compressor-interface.

My question: Is there a way to eliminate the hardware compressor from this equation, and instead use a digital compressor in Cubase? When I simply add a plugin on my "insert" chain, all it is doing is monitoring the previously recorded track, thus clipping doesn't get compressed and eliminated. I would instead like to have a digital auxiliary track in my signal chain before it reaches the "record" point.

I hope this made sense. Thanks!

[the evil]

yoy would have to apply the insert on the input channel, so it would go mic pre, interface, cubase input channel, routed to your track channel. The other side of the equation though is latency. You may have atough time trying to setup threshold and release settings unless you have some extremely low latency to be able to hear whats going on in real time.

[richiebee]

Software compression is not going to prevent clipping at the interface input. You need to use outboard before the interface input stage or record at a lower level and use a compressor to boost/compress in post. I would do the latter, but I'm sure there are people who do the former. Cubase captures at 32 bit floating point regardless of the project settings, so if its peaking when it gets to Cubase, you can be sure that its peaking before it gets there.

[brandondrury]

I've never really understood the use of compressors to prevent clipping. Yes, I know what a compressor does, but a compressor is only going to stop clipping when the initial gain going into the interface has been pushed up to dangerous levels in the first place. A compressor has to be fast in order to REALLY prevent clipping anyway in such a dangerous situation.

If I didn't want to use a hardware compressor, I'd just turn the preamp down a bit. Then when I got to the inserts in Cubase I'd smack it accordingly and use enough make up gain to get where I want to be. No biggie.

Brandon