Hey guys BigNate84 here and welcome to the fourth video
In my live sound 101 video series
Thanks for continuing with the video track here
And I just wanted to thank everyone for commenting and posting their thoughts
About the first three videos I do appreciate that
Some of the feedback I got was that the music in the background was a little bit distracting
And so this video will have no music in the background
And moving forward I probably won’t put any music in the background
And I’ll try that and see how it goes unless there’s some sort of revolt where people
are like
“No bring the music back we want incessant drum beats going sixteen dB down below your
voice
Throughout the entirety of this video series”
I’ll probably scrap the music so I appreciate the feedback
Thanks for helping me improve what I do
So this video we are talking about analog audio signal types
And there is an important distinction between audio signal
There is analog audio signal and there’s digital audio signal
So those are like the two major classifications
Now we won’t be going into digital formats in this video that will be another video
But we’ll be focusing on analog signal types
And there are three common signal types that you run into
Microphone level, line level and speaker level
So microphone level is a very low level signal
Line level is a medium level signal
And speaker level is a high level signal
That is really the simplest way to think about it the easiest way I can break it down to
you
And explain it to you in terms that you’ll just understand right away
You’ve got your microphone which is low level
Line level which is medium
And speaker which is high
So lets talk about microphone level for a minute
The range could be anywhere from no signal at all up to -20 dBu
And that’s just a general ballpark of a nominal working level for microphones
It’s about 10 millionths of a watt a microphone signal could be in that ballpark
About 10 millionths of a watt or expressed in voltages it could be .0775 volts or 77.5
millivolts
So we are talking about very low level signals
And some examples of microphone signals would be from microphones
Be it condenser microphones, dynamic microphones any type of microphone
We’ll get more into the types of microphones again in another video
Or instruments have a very low level signal and guitar pickups have a very low level signal
So they’re kind of all in that same general category
When I say instruments I have to be careful because there is a broad range
Some instruments will output higher level signals but for the most part if its coming
from a guitar
or a pickup of some sort it’s going to be very low level
So the next type is line level
Now this is a little bit louder a little bit stronger of a signal than microphone
And it’s range is about -20 dBu all the way up to +30 dBu
Again that’s just a general ballpark of how loud the signal will be how strong the
signal will be
For line level type signals and its in the ballpark of 1 watt or 24.5 volts
And some examples of line level instruments or devices that will output line level signals
Are keyboards, synthesizers, mixing consoles and processing gear
Your reverbs, your compressors, your limiters any type of audio gear will be at line level
And I should point out there are different flavors of line level
There is consumer line level which is a little bit less
And there’s professional line level which is a little bit more
So it’s good to know the difference between the two and when you’re working with gear
You need to make sure that the inputs and outputs are matched accordingly
To accept the appropriate line level be it consumer or professional
I’m not going to go too deep into that right now but just be aware
It’s still in the same ballpark of line level but there but there are different variations
of line level
And then the third major analog audio signal type is speaker level
And speaker level is the highest level of signal
And it can range anywhere from +30 dBu on up to +50 or even much higher
Anywhere from 15 watts to 500 hundred watts to 5000 watts depending on the scale of your
system
We’re talking major power here with speaker level signals
And the best example of a speaker line level would be going from a power amplifier to a
speaker
And that’s pretty much where you see speaker level
Now this is very important before I close out this video
These signal types when they are plugged into equipment it’s important to make sure you
plug
The correct signal type into equipment that it’s designed to accept
Right, so we’re going to make sure that microphone level signal
Get’s plugged into a mic level input
Line level signal gets plugged into a line level input
And speaker level signal get’s plugged into a speaker level input or a speaker
If you don’t do that bad things can happen
You can’t just plug and play and mix and match, I can’t stress that enough
It’s really important for a live sound person to understand these different types of analog
signal formats
To make sure everything runs smoothly and everything is connected properly
Thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next video
There will be many more to come I imagine somewhere in the ballpark of 50 videos in
this series
So if you’re watching this and there is only four right now don’t worry the video
series is just beginning