Managing gain staging and headroom and fixing over-compressed tracks

As we've been discussing dynamic processors and dynamic range, you may have…heard me throwing around terms like headroom and gain staging.…Headroom is the amount by which the signal-handling capabilities of an audio…system can exceed the average working level of the system.…Headroom can be thought of as a safety zone, allowing transient audio peaks to…exceed this average working range without exceeding the signal capabilities of…an audio system--digital clipping, for example.…Another way to think about this is to imagine the ceilings in your house.…

Unless we're all NBA players, most of us will likely walk around the house…just fine without hitting our heads on the ceiling, and depending on the height of your ceilings,…there's probably a good two to four extra feet of headroom in case you get…excited and want to jump up and down.…Headroom in the analog world allows the signal breathing room before the…circuit starts to distort.…For example, in an analog mixing console, or tape machine, think of headroom as…