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Wow, what the fuck are you lot up to?
A) Rodri - WTF? You're saying on older mixers the DJ's you saw were redlining with only one track playing and that was "fine"? Nope, it just means they didn't know what they were doing and it gets even worse when it's both tracks playing. Sure you could get away with the occasional redline on old formula sound, vestax, rane, bozak, even modern A&H you can get away with it to a degree but on anything else it just sounds like shit. Always has. especially on poineer mixers.
B) Don't put a limiter on the master. Turn it off. It just hides any peaks that clip with hard wall limiting. Fine, to curtail the very odd escapee peak clip, then I suppose it's better than digital clipping but it's bad practice to teach yourself you've always got a buffer if you don't watch your levels.
C) You want to get as close as possible to 0dbfs with your mix. Don't forget your noise floor is at a set level. If you print your mix at -10dbfs then gain change later to get closer to 0dbfs, your noise floor is at -10db proportionate to your signal strength which then increases with your volume change and that therefore means more noise at 0dbfs (bad).
I have to disagree with making up the gain in the analogue world; a quiet digital signal will need a lot of attentuation and the noise floor as stated above is imprinted at the given level. By having to jack it up with an amp or speakers (etc) you're raising the volume of the signal along with the inherent noise. The other problem is that anaolgue amplifiers also add their own noise with increases exponentially as you get louder so the more you have to increase the more noise is introduced.
If you're not doing offline processing after you've mixed (like radio compression etc), What you need to do is mix as close to 0dbfs as possible; so play both tracks, mid mix and set your gain staging on your mixer so that even at the busiest, loudest points (like both tracks dropping at the same time) you're still just under 0db. That means you can mix without clipping.
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