SIGMA EQ Station - Manual (Page 12)

10
REAR PANEL
Analog I/O’s
Depending on the configuration, up to 8 channels of analog
I/O are available.
More on EQ Stations Analog I/O
EQ Station offers some of the finest converters available on
any studio or live processor today. The wide dynamic range
of these converters is complemented by analog domain
gain scaling, so the full resolution of the converters can be
used regardless of the operation level of the surrounding
equipment.
Analog I/O scaling
Max operating level can be set at positions from, 3 to
30dBu, each with additional Full Scale Safety Margin as
shown on illustration below.
For more exotic level handling requirements, the analog
Inputs may take in signals as hot as +30dBu, and both
Inputs and Outputs can have max level set as low as
+3dBu. Analog gain scaling is performed in steps of 3dB
between these extremes, and of course under automated
control.
To obtain good results from any audio system, level
structure and overload margin between machines has to be
set carefully. In Example No 1 of illustration above, the
Mixer, EQ and Amp have not been properly adjusted: The
Amp is driven to overload way before the drive capacity of
the Mixer and EQ is exhausted, and the resulting dynamic
range is only 94dB.
The same equipment performs much better if the
sensitivities are set as illustrated in Example 2. Mixers are
often locked at a certain optimum level, but EQ Station and
the Amps should still be set consciously. Normally, allow
upstream devices to have a bit of headroom over later
elements. The Safety Margin built into EQ Station ensures
that the Amp will always get a clean feed, and eventually
be the first to overload.
Note that insert points even on hi-end consoles tend to
operate at a lower max level than the mixer's main outputs.
Typical balanced insert I/O scaling for EQ Station would be:
- for unbalanced signals : 21dBu
- for balanced signals : 24dBu
EQ Station with
fully expanded
Analog I/O slots