The Good, the Bad, and the Red: Is Going into the Red Always Bad?

If you deal with audio, whether mixing live or in the studio, you have seen the red lights at the top of a meter. You have also probably heard contradicting things about what it means when those red lights spring to life.

Back in the day, they tracked and mixed in the red all the time – and it sounded great!

This is true.

Avoid the red at all times – it will sound terrible.

This is also true.

To add to the confusion, many in the DJ world cross into the red regularly – some you could say live in the red.

Why the great debate? In this piece, we will go into what it means to go into the red and why it is usually something to be avoided, while at the same time it could be very desirable – if executed with restraint and good judgment.

The key difference? Analog vs. Digital.

Back in the day, they tracked and mixed in the red all the time – and it sounded great!

This is true. Particularly in the tracking phase, going into the red yielded some colorful results – especially on drums. The reason these guys worked this way is because all of their equipment was analog; computers were not yet part of the music creation process.

Back then, they ran an electrical signal through several processing circuits and recorded the end result magnetically on a tape. When you overload a magnetic tape strip, a natural compression and distortion occurs. This phenomenon, coupled with the similar type of coloration that occurs when you begin to overload a channel on an analog mixing console, yields a thick, creamy sound that is the epitome of what we think of as “analog.” Listen to a Led Zeppelin record. Listen to Bonham’s kit – that’s what we are talking about.

Another reason for hot signals was to mask a high noise floor. All that analog equipment gets noisy, so engineers would deal with it by recording as hot as they could without destroying the signal – and it worked.

Avoid the red at all times – never go there because it will sound terrible.

This is true. It became true when computers were introduced into the recording process. While overloading a signal results in natural compression and musical distortion in the analog domain, the digital domain is cut and dry. When you overload a signal in the digital domain, it clips hard– meaning the waveform is literally chopped off at the top, resulting in an ugly, jarring distortion that nobody wants to hear. There is no natural compression. There is no musical distortion. There is just a grating BUZZ.

The best practice is to record more quietly in the digital domain, especially since the noise floor has dropped so low. Red in the digital domain starts at 0dB, where any information above is lost.

But what about DJs?

Ah, DJs. You love them, you hate them. The good ones know their tracks, their techniques, and their sound engineering. The bad ones… live in the red.

Modern DJ software and some club setups have limiters built in to them. A limiter will hard compress any signal that tries to overtake the threshold, which is set at about 0dB.

Limiters will keep your signal within the optimal range whether you like or not. The truth is, you can peak into the red on programs like Traktor or Serato and you won’t hear that awful digital distortion I’ve described, though your sound quality will deteriorate if you sit there.

Pushing up against a limiter, the problem may no longer be clipping, but a lack of dynamic range. Dynamics are what give music life. Even the raunchiest club tracks need dynamics to work – you can’t have loud without quiet. When you push into a limiter, you lose that, and your boots-n-cats will lose much of the life that was programmed into it.

There’s nothing wrong with pushing high yellows and seeing the odd red flash during the peak of your DJ set; it happens. Just don’t live there – for your audience’ sake and for yours.

In Conclusion

The red means different things in different situations. The key to overdriving a signal is knowing when it is an option and how to do it tastefully. In the end, it’s about trial and error. So go and drive your signal through the ceiling in the studio – see how it sounds. Just don’t send a mastering engineer a track that hot.

Why? That’s a topic for another day.

-Chris Lazaga
AudioMunk