Sound Interface & Loudness

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
1

Sound Interface & Loudness

Let’s say you’re a digital DJ with a laptop and VCI100SE and are mixing internally…

What is the relationship between the sound interface you use and your max loudness through speakers?

I have experienced both sides of the story.

  1. Sound interface does affect loudness: I was at a speaker rental shop and hooked up my rig and the guy was surprised at how relatively soft the music was playing. He recommended running through an external mixer to get more preamp.

Now I don’t understand anything about preamp but I’m just going to assume it has to do with the strength or amplitude of the signal

  1. Preamp doesn’t matter. Someone on a forum said that a line input in a mixer bypasses preamp and doesn’t affect loudness.

So which is it??

2

I use the Audio 4 DJ and it is LOUD. Before that i uses an M-audio FW-410 which was Much quieter.

As for the preamp, it would be weird if the line bypassed the pre-amp as how else would the gain work?

Edit: Thinking about it now the pre-amp would boost the levels if you used the gain pot and turned everything up to 11.

3

Dang what am I doing wrong then?

What are your audiofire console settings like? what is your setup?

4

On the little mixer (the Mackie) you’ve been looking for, preamps are for MIC, 'cause a MIC signal is very low… you need to amplify it to use it correctly…
Line signal is already at the “good level” when getting in the mixer… that’s why you’ve got a switch to select between Line / MIC and why generaly you’ve got the Gain Knob at the minimum when using Line Inputs (the minimum for the gain knob is not -infiny but -15dB)… Just try to put a Line signal and keeping the preamp selected and you will see how red are going to be your vumeter…

The Line signal has to be amplified by the amp of the speakers, but not when getting in the mixer, not to use it in the mixer and neither getting out from the mixer to the amp…

5

Well, running stereo pair you are sending out of your sound card is line level, just like a CD deck.

The issue comes down to the hardware inside the sound card and your soundcard settings.

You won’t be using the pre-amp of the mixer, but you’ll be using the mixer to amplify the signal (via gain/eq and volume). It doesn’t hurt, though. You can also run it into an amp to speakers, which would do a similar thing. I have never DJ’d in a club without plugging into some sort of mixing board/amp to give my signal an extra boost so it can be loud for a club.