Capturing great sounding audio requires a good recording environment, the right equipment, and setting your recording levels appropriately for how loud the sound source is and how close it is to your microphone. With levels set too low, your recording won’t be loud enough and you’ll hear background noise, due to poor signal-to-noise ratio. If levels are too high, you may exceed the maximum level the microphone can capture and risk clipping, which can cause unwanted distortion, and ruin your take. .
That’s why doing a soundcheck is important. You want to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio and capture the audio as high above the noise floor as possible. But what if something gets louder than you expect, even after soundchecking, and you don’t want to trash that recording?
To solve this we've developed Automatic Clip Correction, a recently patented software enhancement that provides an easy to use solution to make clipping a thing of the past. With this update, the Audigo microphone’s onboard memory, software and processing capabilities automatically create four channels of audio input - two each for the two capsules in the microphone. One input records at the level manually set during soundcheck, and the other records at a lower setting.
Similar approaches exist using backup tracks and manual post-processing, but with Audigo, our software dynamically determines which parts of each signal to save in the final recording - WHILE you are recording. If clipping occurs, the lower gain signal will be utilized for just that section - down to as little as 10 milliseconds.
Automatic Clip Correct then reconstructs the optimal waveform by lowering the level of the higher-gain segment to match the gain of the lower-gain segment, combining the two into a contiguous waveform. It then boosts the resulting waveform back to the manually set gain with soft limiting to avoid clipping. This approach optimizes the signal-to-noise ratio of the overall recording by using the low noise-floor audio everywhere except for the small sections where the clipping occurred.
We set out to create a solution that was completely automated, wouldn’t require any post-processing by the user, and honors the dynamics of a recording. Technologies like Automatic Gain Control (AGC) involve heavy-handed, continuous gain adjustments - sacrificing the performance dynamics of the signal. High bit-depth storage (32-bit float) can preserve musical information, but it won’t provide the signal-to-noise ratio benefits of setting an appropriate mic level, nor will it prevent clipping. Audigo’s Automatic Clip Correction, on the other hand, takes a light touch approach and does it all for you. And in real time.
As with all aspects of Audigo, we’ve engineered this process to allow for future features and enhancements, so stay tuned. If you like, send your suggestions to us at info@audigolabs.com. We always appreciate hearing from you.
