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Why is my microphone peaking at -6 dB?

Sound Design Asked by burneddi on October 28, 2021

I have a cheap, simple recording setup: a Behringer UMC204HD DAC interface and a Behringer C-1 microphone connected over XLR.

For some reason the input from the microphone peaks (clips) at precisely -6 dB in Audacity and other audio software, so I have to manually add gain in postprocessing to it to make it peak at 0 dB. The DAC doesn’t have any sort of microphone boost feature that I know of that would affect this.

Is this some sort of a hardware limitation or a software incompatibility? I have tried the setup under both Windows and Linux so I suspect it’s not a software thing.

One Answer

The answer is, as Tetsujin suggested in the comments above, the result of mixing mono into stereo or vice versa. It seems most digital audio tools I used automatically apply pan law in these situations, which results in -6 dB of gain when mixing mono into stereo. In my case, my audio interface's inputs are stereo but my microphone is mono, so the audio was only on the left channel, and mixing this into mono also resulted in the -6 dB pan law being applied automatically by both PulseAudio and Audacity.

In my case, I fixed this by remapping only the left channel into mono in PulseAudio, which avoided the automatic application of pan law: load-module module-remap-source master=alsa_input.usb-BEHRINGER_UMC204HD_192k-00.analog-stereo master_channel_map=front-left channel_map=mono rate=48000 format=s24le.

Answered by burneddi on October 28, 2021

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