Wavestation gain structure – or, Why is my sound clipping?
It is possible to cause digital clipping when programming sounds on the Wavestation. The solution is to reduce the internal gain of the Patches, on the Performance Part Details page. For more information, read on. This issue is related to something you might be familiar with in mixers: gain structure. Basically, all systems (analog and digital) will have some point of maximum gain, after which they begin to clip. Analog systems may do this gradually; in digital systems, there’s usually no middle ground. The irony is that, right up until that clip point, the louder the signal is, the greater the S/N ratio and thus the better the sound. So, the trick is to get it as loud as possible before clipping. I’m sure that most of you have heard that before. In a digital system, it’s the same thing. However, in a digital synthesizer, it becomes difficult to realize the optimum automatically. This is because we have more than a single signal (say that ten times fast) to worry about; we have 16 or 3
