Control Room - A Solution To Faulty Knobs
In my opinion, I think the most notorious sound cards for developing a noisy gain knob are the M-Box series by Avid. While the notoriety of this great sounding audio interface might have inspired this post, engineers who adjust gain faders on a mixer or any other sound card incessantly during recordings still risk damaging that physical component before its intended life span. The scenario where there is no vocal booth (and if present is not sound proof) is very common in small and medium-sized studios, so to keep the recording clean the engineer has to turn down the volume of the monitors just before every record take to avoid bleeds. Most engineers will manually gain these knobs, faders or encoders on the sound card or mixer every time a record is to be taken. This will in no time wear out these knobs and before long they'll start to malfunction and introduce noise. Volume riding can be done right from your DAW's mixer! In its simplest form, you can just adj...