Omni Channel - Saturation volume compensation?

1

Hi,

I’ve been trying Omni Channel out and noticed that when you increase the saturation this also increase the overall audio level. However, there doesn’t appear to be a way to compensate for this? This means that if you want to make any changes to the amount of saturation part way through a mix, this will also have an effect on the following modules response?

2

This is actually a psychoacoustic effect, Saturation gives you the illusion of making something louder… to a point. As you’d notice when you jack up the saturation the meters don’t really change much.

To maintain the “perceived” loudness it’s often necessary to automate the output level as well. A small handful of plugins allow you to do things like this automatically, but not the Omni.

3

Hi Simon. Thankyou for the reply. Yes I understand the psychoacoustic effect but am really surprised that OmniChannel doesn’t have an automatic volume compensation built in.

4

I understand, but as I ways saying, with maybe a few exceptions no dev really does that.

Probably because it would only work for the first initial amount of distortion applied, but after that there is no real loudness gain. In fact, it can start to decrease in levels. How much and how well it works would depend on how much distortion your sound would have in the first place.

Clean sounds you might get about 6-9dB distortion before there is no loudness change, for example, but a distorted guitar or synth might only get 1-3dB. Where as a square wave synth preset most likely would get 0db as that thing is already makes out.

So really, how do you compensate for loudness changes when it varies greatly depending upon what you put in in to it.

I’m guessing this is why no-one really adds auto volume compensation for anything that distorts.