The whole point of gain staging is to optimize the signal levels to minimize noise and distortion.  In order to see what that means, you’ll need to start of with a key definition.

Signal to Noise Ratio

Don’t overthink this one, it is exactly as it says, the ratio of the signal you’re actually trying to produce compared to the noise present in the signal.

All electronics produce noise, it’s a simple fact of life.  The sources of the noise are all over the place, the typical contributors can be broken down like this, in roughly descending order of contribution:

• Ambient Noise –  This happens only during microphone recording and is the background noise in your room while recording.  Fans, your computer, your family or roommates, the furnace, nearby traffic… any of these will add noise to your recording.  The only way to reduce this is to make your room quieter through soundproofing or otherwise eliminating these sources.
• Electromagnetic Interference –  Your house, and pretty much every building supplied with power is full of 60Hz electromagnetic noise, and countless sources of much higher frequency signals from WiFi, cordless phones, cellular signals, whatever.  This is invariablly picked up on wires and within circuit boards.  This can be minimized through good design of your equipment, like grounded metal enclosures.  Cables are major culprits here, the longer the cable the more likely it will pick up noise.  Balanced cables by design eliminate that interference, use them everywhere you can.  If you have to use unbalanced cables, make sure they’re good quality and as short as possible.
• Internal Equipment Noise –  All electronics will have some amounts of noise generated internally.  There are two main sources of this, the power supply design itself, and thermal noise from resistors.  The power supply is supposed to take the noisy 60Hz power from the wall and turn it into pristine DC voltage for the electronics to actully use.  Typically, these are designed pretty well, but a failing part or a cheapo chinese knock off can cause problems.  The thermal noise in resistors shows up as broadband white noise and is generated through some mystery of physics.  The details are beyond my level of education, but it’s a fact of life.  The higher the value of the resistor, the more thermal noise.  So a good electronic design will use the smallest resistors possible throughout.

Noise in a system is typically of a pretty constant amplitude once setup and powered on.  You can take the steps above to minimize it, but once it’s there the only thing you can control in the Signal to Noise ratio is the signal level itself.

The signal is what you actually want to send through and eventually hear.  Making this signal larger relative to the constant level noise = better signal to noise ratio.  This works up to a point, because all electronics also have a finite, limited signal level they can handle.  When you exceed this level, what happens is the tops and bottoms of the signal simply get cut off, or clipped.  That results in nasty distortion of your desired signal and should be avoided.  For your typical amplifier, this is determined by the power supply voltage, and the design.  In order to maximize your signal to noise ratio, all you have to do is pass through the maximum signal level possible for the amplifier.

Proper Gain Staging

So proper gain staging really comes down to maximizing your signal to noise ratio for each component in the signal chain.  The signal level should be set so the absolute largest peak hits the absolute highest signal level capable for each device in the chain.  There’s one thing mucking up that simple task though, dynamics.  The trick there becomes figuring out exactly what that largest possible signal will be.  Singers can be all over the place, based on how far they are away from the mic and how confidently they’re singing.  Percussion is terrible for consistency and can produce huge variations in signal level.  That means the best you can do is plan for the loudest signal you can test, and bring it down slightly in case that’s not really the loudest when the tape is rolling or the show is on.

If order to make it simple, your components in the chain will need a few things:

• Input level adjustment
• Signal meters
• Output level adjustment

Lacking any of those and you’ll have a harder time pulling this off, though it can still be done with reasonable guesses.

Putting it in Practice

Let’s create a hypothetical chain of components:

Microphone -> Pre-Amp -> Compressor -> Equalizer -> Sound Card

In order to set levels, you’ll need to start at the left, the first part of the chain.  Obviously a microphone doesn’t have a level to adjust, so you’ll simply need to give it the loudest sound you think you’ll have happen.

The pre-amp will then be adjusted to with that loud sound, it’s output is near maximum.  Your typical mic pre will have a gain adjustment, at least a peak clip indicator, and an output level.  Turn the gain up until the clip light blinks, then back it back down a tad.  Crank the output level up as high as you can, depending on the next piece, our compressor.

Compressors may not have an input level but should have some metering to show you your levels.  The mic pre should be feeding it with as much signal level as it can handle.  You should only adjust the compressor settings after you have the signal level set for the input.  Then you’ll tweak the output level as high as you can for the next component, the equalizer.

EQ’s vary a lot so this part will depend on what your EQ has to offer.  Hopefully you’ve got some sort of peak or clip indicator.  Remember, boosting with the EQ adds gain so if you crank the level up so it’s on the edge of clipping when the EQ is flat, you won’t be able to boost at all   Turn it down a bit to allow you some room to boost what you need.  If you’ve got an output level adjustment crank it as high as you can for the next component, the sound card.

For sound cards, you’ll need to watch the input level in your software of choice.  Arm a channel in your DAW software, or use your sondcard’s control panel to monitor the input level and crank it up just shy of the peak 0dBFS level.  Then, turn it down a little more.  Not much sounds worse than a clipping analog to digital converter so leave yourself some room.

Now your set!  But if anything changes anywhere in the signal chain, all components downstream may need re-adjusted to keep your gain optimized.

How’d this all start?

Well, the beginning was innocent enough. I had used Outlook in the corporate world for years and grows accustom to managing my calendar, tasks, notes, and contact lists. I’m not sure if my memory was faulty so I needed a computer to keep me organized, or if using a computer for organization led to faulty memory. Regardless, I’m now pretty reliant on these little devices to remember what our ancestors managed to handle using something called paper and pen (whatever that is).

My Smartphone History

The Samsung SPH-i300 was a Palm OS phone complete with a stylus that had the bonus feature of duplicating as a brick in the event of a street brawl. Not to mention it made phone calls! After setting up the palm desktop software and hooking up the handy docking station to an old school RS232 serial port I had all my contact and calendar data in perfect sync with my desktop… awesome! I played with Palm OS programs loaded through the serial port for a bit (Apps, if you will) and happily chugged along and organized our band tour calendar while on the road.

After the resistive touch screen went screwy and would no longer calibrate, leaving a whole row of icons useless and losing the ability to scroll up and down, that phone had to go. Its replacement, the near identical, but flip phone style Samsung SPH-i500. This little bugger still had the docking station, and had been upgraded to a fancy USB connection! The screen was way better and all the programs I had before happily loaded onto the slightly updated Palm OS. Calendar and contact sync went on unabated, until one little feature it lacked began to bug me, SMS. Yes, texting was on the rise and I now had my future wife to communicate with, so I needed a phone that could handle that sort of thing.

Enter the Samsung SPH-i600, a Windows based phone purchased for cheap off eBay. This one turned out to be a huge mistake. Without a stylus and Palm’s handy graffiti shorthand entry system writing on that thing was a pain. Not to mention the screen was subpar, it was thicker than the i500 I replaced and looked years behind when I got it. Lucky for me since I bought it third party my upgrade came up quickly and I was able to ditch that sucker fast!

It was time to try a QWERTY keyboard phone, the Motorola Moto-Q. Still on Windows, but much updated and with a better screen that phone did the job. I was texting like a madman and had full sync capabilities. And for the first time I thought to myself, can I get some e-mail on this sucker? The answer was yes, but only poorly. My corporate mail was synced only when plugged in and Yahoo! Was pulled by POP3 access only when I asked it to, but it was still kind of neat. Mobile web browsing?… Only if you’re some sort of sadomasochist. Web pages were super slow, poorly rendered, and difficult to navigate.

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The next time an upgrade came along I was focused on not only managing calendar and contacts, but also e-mail… enter the Blackberry. The Curve was my weapon of choice and with a working Blackberry Enterprise Server connection at work, that sucker was an e-mailing master. To this day I’ve yet to meet an e-mailing equal. The trackball was a little funky and web browsing was still a bit weak with the relegation to the mobile versions of sites, but for messaging, it was just plain awesome.

By this point my addiction to trying new phones was peaking, iPhone had come and changed how people interacted with phones and raised the bar to being able to handle multimedia, full web browsing and every little task you could imagine such as the all important fart noise applications inexplicably populating the early App Store. But alas I was on Sprint, and had been ever since day 1. By this time my wife and I had 2 lines with different contract dates and I was reaping benefits from my long term customer status, so no iPhone for me.

Instead the new Palm Pre with its innovative WebOS was making headlines on the tech sites and looked awesome. We grabbed two of them and indeed, they were awesome. That phone still has a special place in my heart for the beauty of the OS, the simple functionality of the notifications, unified calendar and contacts, and slick multitasking. As physical defect kept cropping up, I kept my Pre alive and hoped Palm would update faster and apps would start flying into the Palm store…. Alas Palm dropped the ball. There would be no successor to the Pre (no, the wimpy little Pixie doesn’t count). I begrudgingly jumped ship while the WebOS world stagnated and died before my eyes.

This time around, my upgrade budget was slim, so I went with the el-cheapo offering, the LG Optimus S and first experienced Android. After an inordinate amount of time playing with settings, launchers, widgets, accounts, add on programs, and a huge app market, I made it my own. It still didn’t do a few things my good old Palm Pre did, like handle Exchange Server e-mail so well, notify me of stuff, or integrate calendars seamlessly, but it worked pretty well. Then one day I realized why it was a budget phone. Multiple e-mail and social networking accounts eat memory, and with only 140MB of application memory on board I began hitting the “out of space” warnings. If ignored, these little warnings escalate into “I’m no longer accepting messages”… unacceptable. After uninstalling apps I thought were cool a couple times a week and constantly shuffling off as many programs as I could to the SD card I began watching for my upgrade date to come and plotting my next device.

Meanwhile, my wife’s upgrade came up too, and she went with a high(ish) end Windows Phone 7 device, the HTC Arrive. Having not used it as my only device, I have limited interaction, but I’m still impressed with it look and feel. The interface is slick and simple, the responsiveness is incredible. But the hardware is thick, heavy, and just plain inferior. Now if they released a thin version with a big high res screen on Sprint… that would be cool and it just might win me over. The other downside is the limited application support, while many apps are available and look great, the big players still target iOS and Android. My wife has run into a couple too many scenarios where something she wants to do on her phone is not available for Windows… too bad. While that’s likely to change in the future as Nokia and Microsoft push these suckers to the masses, it’s a tough thing to get over now.

Decisions, decisions

As my upgrade loomed, Sprint began carrying the iPhone, leaving me with a tough decision. Stick with Android, or jump ship to an iOS phone. I decided that I’d target the high end of the spectrum this time, leaving me to choose between the best of the best for late 2011, the Samsung Galaxy SII and the iPhone 4S. Considering a bit of my personal background:

• I don’t have any Mac’s at home (extensive Windows network)
• All personal info already lives in gMail, sync’d with Outlook
• I love to tinker and customize my interfaces
• I don’t like to have what everyone else has, for possibly irrational reasons

The pros and cons were weighed carefully:

The current winner (for me): Samsung Galaxy SII

I’ve had that sucker for several months now, and it has proved to be the best phone I’ve had… ever. The Android experience is light years different than it was on the low end Optimus S. I suspect a good deal of the bad rap of poor responsiveness and crashes is actually due to the scattered and poorly configured Android devices out there, as opposed to the carefully polished and limited choices of iOS devices. Of course that’s a simple opinion, but it’s valid nonetheless. Is the iPhone 4S a bad phone, heck no! It’s just not the choice I made, for personal reasons. My Linux aficionado, program coding buddy may have plenty of argument over the philosophy of the nearly illegally stolen from Oracle Java stack bastardizing his beloved Linux kernel, and his arguments have some merit, but for me I’m still a happy camper. And now that I’ve been using a 4.5” screen for months, those screens on all other phones look and feel so darn tiny I don’t know how anyone can use them.

Crap I love about it:

• Supposed Android inferiority be damned, this thing is plenty fast and responsive
• Butt loads of memory, haven’t used half of it
• Web, pictures, and video on that screen are simply awesome
• Wide variety of apps and integration with my DLNA entertainment system computers in my house
• iPhone may have a better one, but that camera is solid!

Crap I don’t like so much:

• DLNA playback just isn’t as smooth as I want it to be
• App market has some nasty, borderline malware ad infested doozies
• Battery flying out when it hits the ground accidentally, though I suppose that’s better than cracked glass

So what are the choices in the future?

As the smart phone market continues to evolve we have but two major standing players, Apple and Google with a potential but distant third place for Windows Phone. I’ll continue to keep my eyes open for what suits me best when my next upgrade comes along in a couple years. By then I’ll be watching for:

• 4”+ screen, but less than 5”, there’s a finite limit of thumb length and pocket size
• High Definition 1280X720 or better resolutions
• Even better cameras
• Smoother integration into my home entertainment systems

To be more specific with the feature requests, here are a few things I hope to see from our phones in the future:

• Better multitasking. WebOS was awesome in this regard, really easy to switch between open apps to, for example, refer to an email to populate a calendar entry or contact
• Slick and simple sharing of what I’m looking at. Why can’t I just fling a web page I’m viewing on my phone over to another platform or browser on the network? How cool would that be: “Check this out!”… fling… the page I was just looking at appears on my PC, or a tablet my Wife’s using, or her phone, or the refrigerator, or my internet enabled tennis shoes, whatever!
• That same quick sharing should apply to music, videos, and basically whatever I’m doing

Rest assured, as the next upgrade cycle comes up there will be way fancier devices than we have now, and I’ll be itching to try them out.

I hope you like it.  If you have constructive, non-spammy comments let them rip!

Laptops

Efficiency is the name of the game.  In this segment, both Intel and AMD have some serious contenders for your mobile budget, at least after AMD’s recent release of its new fangled “APU” processors that put a serious graphics processor sitting right next to the plain old CPU on the same tiny chunk of silicone.  For this group I’ll order roughly based on potential battery life.

Intel Atom

Best known for starting the Netbook trend a year or two ago, these suckers take very little battery power.  The downside is their performance scales down at the same time.  While they’re just about fast enough for surfing the web, doing anything serious will become  tedious rather quickly.  There’s a reason these are found in typically 10” mini notebooks, a screen any larger and you might be tempted to do some actual work.  To seal the low performance deal, the latest generation of Atom is stuck with the positively anemic Intel graphics while nVidia is locked out of making anything that may actually work quickly.  Still, this is a viable option for someone looking for all day battery life for casual web surfing.

AMD Brazos E-350

Keeping nearly the same tiny power envelope as Atom but paring it with some potent 3D rendering graphics on the same chip, AMD has given Intel’s Atom a serious competitor.  Similarly to the Atom, if you push some heavy number crunching on it, you’ll feel like you’re using your grandma’s computer, though it’s still considerably faster than Atom.  Some manufacturer’s are putting this sucker into 14” and 15” full size laptop chassis, but I contend that this is still best suited for the diminutive 13” and under class.

Intel Core 2

Even though Intel’s moved on to newer designs (coming later), these things are still all over the store shelves.  The battery life for the low voltage CULV parts is stellar, and they beat the pants off Atom and Brazos while doing it.  The downside is typically the paired Intel GMA450 graphics which will simply respond with a “You want me to do what?” when tasked with a 3D game.  Even so, there’s a reason Apple still sells the Macbook Air with one of these inside it, the power consumption is tough to beat.

AMD Llanos “A” series

Brand spanking new on the market these chips are targeting Intel’s stronghold on power efficient chips, and doing it well.  These are internally based on AMD’s current Athlon / Phenom  II architecture, which isn’t all that super powered but still fairly quick.  The real sauce is the integrated Radeon graphics core that simply beats anything Intel can integrate like a red headed step child.  They go toe to toe with Intel’s i3 battery life and if you want to fire up a game, they can actually do the job without resorting to early 90’s graphical detail.  These chips are also available in deskstop form, however the integrated graphics are still beaten by an add in card of $100 or more so the value of these quickly diminishes.

Laptop and Desktop crossover chips

Intel i3 Sandy bridge

The budget end of the Intel “I” lineup is a stellar CPU performer with good general performance graphics built in.  In raw CPU tasks, such as converting a movie to play on your phone, making a DVD, working on some big images, or whatever else you can throw at it, these CPU’s will outperform their AMD rivals.  If gaming isn’t what you’re likely to do, these are excellent choices.  In the desktop world it’s hard to beat these unless you’re really constrained on budget, where AMD can get even cheaper for almost the performance.

Intel i5 / i7 Sandy bridge on steroids

These suckers are fast!  They make my 2 year old desktop systems at home look like Casio calculators for elementary school kids.  Of course the faster you go the more you’ll kill your battery, but Intel’s done a superb job of sucking every bit of performance out of these things while being frugal on battery.  In the desktop world, nothing comes close.  The absolute fastest AMD chip out there can just about match the absolute slowest Intel i5 in most workloads.

AMD Athlon II

These are the budget king, at the expense of performance.  When combined with the variety of cheaper motherboards you can find with a plethora of options these become the single cheapest way to get a modern PC going.  In laptops, the battery life will be poor, period, but in a desktop, who cares.

AMD Phenom II

The current top of the AMD line can’t compete with performance against Intel’s “I” cores, but when you throw 6 full cores of processor at a easily multithreaded load, like transcoding a movie or something, you can do a lot of work with a whole lot less money.  You’ll find these in a few laptops too, but keep your power cord handy.

But really, how fast do you need?

Generally, the last 3 years of processors have been fast enough for what 90% of the population attempts to do with their computers.  You’re a whole lot more likely to be bogged down by the massive amount of spyware / malware / viruses and other evil distributions of the morally lacking found on the wild wild web than you are your choice of CPU.  So you’ll just have to weigh your priorities.  For me, waiting an hour to turn a movie into a nicely compress h264 file using handbrake has become my most annoying waiting game.  That’s on my el-cheap’o 2 cores of Athlon II at 3.3GHz, an Intel i something or other would pretty quickly cut that in half or better.  But in the end, I just start it and sleep on it, so what does it matter?  The video games I haven’t got the time to play are typically a bit older too, so a pair of high clock cores does a decent job of filling up the screen just fine.  When I get the urge, I’ll just drop a 6 core Phenom in there and keep it going another year or two.  Ultimately, games may be the undoing of my “fast enough” policy, but unless you’re paying for bragging rights, you may want to ask yourself: “How fast do I really need?”

While high end Mac Pro systems attached to dedicated Pro Tools hardware may rule the high end studio setups for the foreseeable future, the average Joe isn’t in the market for a $10,000 + setup and has to step it back a bit.  This is where the Apple route starts to hit some heavy competition on the Windows side.

iOS

Take a quick look at the latest Apple earnings and the material being published by Apple.  Their focus these days is squarely on gadgets with the Mac’s and OSX getting almost a secondary treatment.  From a business perspective this makes perfect sense.  Apple is making money hand over fist with iOS, its gadgets, and related iTunes app purchases.  So naturally a business designed to make money is going to focus where the money is.  At this time, it’s not their computers.

Hardware Refreshes

The focus on where the money is manifests itself in slow updates to the core components in the Mac lineup.  Intel’s latest Core processors have been available for a few years now in the i7, then the i5 and i3.  It was just this past March when they finally appeared in the Macbook Pro lineup, a full 6 months after they appeared in PC laptops.  But take a look at the non-pro versions, the air, iMac, and mini lineups… all of which are still carrying the now antique Core 2 processors, and typically for the same price you can find a much more powerful Core i3/i5 system on the dark side.  That leaves an awful large gap in their lineup, handily filled by PC vendors on the Windows side.

To be fair, the high end lineup of Mac’s are still well designed machines with decent values compared to the PC world.  The Mac Pro is uber powerful, and decently priced for the machine you get.  Likewise, the Macbook Pro line is very well designed and reasonably cost competitive to similar PC models (even if they do get hot enough to cook an egg in your lap)  Of course to get decent parity on value, you’re going to have to step above that $1,000 price point (or way above for a Mac Pro).

The Old Arguments are New Again

I written about this, and so have others.  Windows has it’s problems, as does Macintosh. In reality the differences are still small, and ultimately both are just tools to get the job done.  So as I’ve said before, much of this decision comes down to simple preference.

Conclusions

So based on these points:

• Apple is increasingly focused on iIOS gadgets over Mac computers
• The low to middle budget categories ($1,000 and under) are not covered by Apple’s Mac lineup

Here’s a quick makeshift decision matrix for which route to go:

Go with a Mac

• I currently use a Mac based recording software package
• I currently have peripherals like my audio interface that work best on Mac
• I have a budget of well over $1,000 for a computer, hate to fuss with them, and like good industrial design
• I simply hate PC’s and won’t change

Get a Windows PC

• I currently use a Windows based recording software package
• I currently have peripherals like my audio interface that work fine on Windows
• I want the cheapest setup I can get without sacrificing too much speed
• I want to use the latest and greatest components as soon as the come off the manufacturing line
• Not only am I not afraid of  computer parts, I enjoy the smell of a freshly cracked open ESD bag

So the time had come…

The look and feel of The Register has been drastically updated to use full screen tabbed windows and fancy pants graphics to make the application look more and more professional.  The core functionality is the same and aside from a couple new search and navigation tricks the program is the same.  Backup files from earlier versions are fully compatible and can be restored without trouble.

Visit The Register page for details and download links to the installation packages.