Record Level Too Low - How To Adjust?

I am the user of my own PA. And I know how to level. :laughing: :rofl:

Why the heck are you thinking we (The Community) are totally noobs ?!

Yea. For sure, maybe we have not all the clues you have. But we know how to use our equipment, except of the missreading of the Channel Level, that I know now also.

There are many ways to get to rome … and also in audio.

Only If you can´t reach the PA, or you are not permitted to change settings to the PA, than you use the Master knob to adjust the level.

Nothing else I said.

The DJ Equipment must be at a decent (normaly 0dB) setted Level.

Anywhere you must reduce the level … If you can´t do it on the PA, you must do it at your equipment. Else you need a meeting at your ear doctor.

So. And I am now out of this …

The whole point of that metering, including on the master, is to optimize the performance of the gear, in this case the P4. That does matter and why all that stuff is on there. That level gets sent to the DACs and outputs, then down cables. It serves an actual purpose and running things right isn’t some willy nilly “well you have to control the volume somewhere” rationale.

This has been an interesting topic, indeed. I feel the need to chime in, since I started this thread nearly a year ago.

  1. Thanks to Reticuli’s early lesson, I simply downloaded Audacity and use the “amplify” effect on my recordings if I want to take them public. It’s part of my “process” now. I get it!
  2. I’m surprised nobody is bringing up the fact that this was discovered in a “live” environment, with speakers blaring and microphone being in use, thus a threshold for feedback…balancing the mic, music (lowered when mic is in effect, of course) to the appropriate master for the PA - yet the recording levels are severely low, right? But plenty of headroom for post production. (DJDark just mentioned something about this as I was typing it!)
  3. There’s a knob for master, booth, zone…would just be nice to have one for the output level to the recording…and do away with the post production. It has nothing to do with laziness, just simplifying the process.
  4. I agree that generally most DJs are uninformed about live sound or recording techniques - lack of experience or willingness to learn. But don’t lump us all into that category…some of us actually care and want to learn how to “do it properly!”
  5. I’m surprised we have new Denon DJ gear this year, but still no update about this (recording level - they said it was coming!), and still waiting on other promised features in updates. This next one should be awesome, right??? Nothing but time on our hands right now!

Peace to all my fellow DJs…

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Yes Denon please add a user-adjust level for recording level of the recording so that we don’t get low level recording.

For me it doesn’t have to be a slider on the screen. It can be a choice list of different Db gains to be applied to the sound, or it can be a choice list of Recording level High / Medium / Low for eachDJ to choose their required level

If 50 people say it’s too low and one arrogant egotist says it doesn’t need changing, please listen to the 50, not the 1.

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Yes sir we need that! Am with you on that :+1:

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That would rely on whatever device you were playing it back on to recognise gain boost tag and adjust playback accordingly.

Probably alright for some laptops and DJ softwares and some daws but not on much professional Hardwares

Better to cure it at source - by increasing the record level

On the video I meant to say the Prime Go has no LEDs between 0dBVU nominal point and the top clip LED, not the Prime 2. My bad.

I love that unit but i simply can`t believe that it has an “issue” like that. So i prefer to record externally via line-in on a computer…

BTW: When you load up a mix to LANDR (even pumped up to around -9dB) it says "your recording does have very low dynamics). Yes i know that LANDR is for mastering unmastered tracks and that all of our Beatport tracks are mastered already. But still. If you just record your mix via line-in at whatever level ever you`ll be fine.

Another funny fact: I installed some SSD to the internal slot (directly without any adapter e.g.) and after 1-2 minutes i got the message “the installed drive is too slow to handle recordings” - ?!?

Denon - that recording feature is real true comedy! PLEASE work on it!

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Dont record to same drive that you’re reading tracks from.

Just cause of Denon isnt able to to provide some solid feature which isnt “hyper technology”? Okay for me as a workaround but i expect a fix here! The transfer speed of a SSD is more than nough to handle read & write at the same time. And IF it would be like that they should put in on the manual.

BTW: Just started a new recording and it was fine for more than 2 hours…

Yeah . That’s great advice. It’s not as though a usb drive Stick isn’t cheap now

I guess it will work, but I just avoid it since it failed a few times on me that way.

Hello Virtual DJ friends , please I really need your help with 3 bugs on Denon Prime 4 1.- Why Volumen of Facebook Broadcast its very LOW , if I erase Microphone Input volumen level its high but can not talk in Broadcast .

2.- Why on Serato DJ Denon Prime Master Level its High and powerful , here on virtual dj the Master Output its LOW and not is Config db because I make a lot of change and Serato DJ have better Master output PLEASE FIX this

3.- Sometimes when I put search function the virtual keyboard not clear and looks distortion then I put folder and return tu Search and keyboard appears good .FIX this Please

Thanks for all your help really love Prime 4 with Virtual DJ only try to fix this and will be better

Att: Edwin Altamirano Quito-Ecuador

I feel your pain. This has been like this since day one on the Prime 4.

I understand the need to avoid clipping.

Hopefully, this will get improved upon in a future release now that the FX are done. :blush:

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Out of interest, what level are your channel meters running at?

What I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that people want to make promo mixes and upload them online WITHOUT any kind of work on them.

Like…you need a PC anyway to upload mixes…why the f*** is a problem to open Audacity and hit that normalize button? Even when I did mixes that were spot on (no weird transitions from old disco to new dance tracks with different volume dynamics, no peaks) I still did normalization in Audacity just to squeeze that 1-2db out of it.

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Fully agree with this, its one button to activate it.

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Since this topic has picked up again, I’d like to come in with some facts about digital audio which I hope will alleviate any concerns that people might have.

I’ll even put the TL:DR first

  • Recordings should be normalized (have the volume increased so that the maximum is within a few db or so the digital max) as a matter of standard best practice before it is distributed. This can be done completely for free with open source audio programs (like Audicity).
  • The recording quality is sufficiently high that any normalization in volume will still result in significantly higher than cd quality.

The longer explanation:

Digital recordings have a hard limit to their total loudness. If the input gets louder, the recording will clip and distort. The margin between this digital limit and the recording volume is called headroom.

Engine records with a comfortable amount of headroom, because in the wild world of DJing - sometimes things get loud. Someone may jump on the mic, or maybe there’s some wild scratching all of a sudden - all which can increase the peak volume of the recording. In addition, the recording volume is disconnected from the main volume knob. This is to prevent things like turning up (when the party really gets going) or turning down (when the police come) the mix from having an affect on the recording itself.

All digital recordings also have a limited dynamic range - that is, there is a limit volume range between the maximum and minimum volume that the recording could have. Anything below this is technically digital noise. This measurement is done in bit depth. CD Quality recordings in 16 bit have a dynamic range of 96dB. Engine records in 24 bits, giving it a 144dB dynamic range.

The point is this - normalizing the volume does lower the dynamic range of the recording as well. However, the volume adjustment would have to be increased 48 db (144-96) before it dips below CD quality. The average headroom - which probably runs anything from 16-12dB means that these recordings are still well above CD quality audio when normalized.

For the future - there are several ways to tackling this issue. One would be to simply put a normalization process into Engine. That way, the recordings would be more or less ready to go as soon as they are processed and normalized on the players. Another option would be to be a user controlled volume offset - which is what the majority of people are asking for. Keep in mind however, that this manual control means that if you set this too high, clipping may occur. Also -the track would still need to be normalized anyway.

So in summary - I hope that this helps explain why this isn’t such a dire issue in terms of audio quality. The conversation can continue as needed, but I’d like to flag this issue as the “solution” as the it answers the question “How to Adjust”. The answer is “To normalize it.”

Please feel free to refer other threads or questions on the topic to this post.

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Hey @AIRVince, this is actually a cool idea. Maybe recorder in P4/2/go and SC Live2/4 could have a normaliser post process function, with some small adjustments. So after the recording is done by the user, they could choose to auto-normalise their recording directly on engine os device. With ability to tweak the volume of the process a bit. This way many people probably would get what they ask for, and As You said - recordings could be almost good to go, right of the device. I have a feeling, that would make many users happy.

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That’s so true. I know some people initially worry about not having a hot enough audio file that they’re not fully exploiting the fidelity of the available bit depth they’ve got, but most of their audio lacks the dynamic range for it to really make much difference if you bother analyzing it, anyway. Bigger issue they come back with is later being surprised they’re so much quieter than everyone else, which, god forbid, gets into that best practice stuff meeting demands where they want to be loud enough. Once streaming or hosting sites get through with their files, though, the audio has been subjected to worse than what basic normalization is ever going to do to their files… assuming the user didn’t normalize right up to the 0dBFS brick wall.


Normalizing the volume should not reduce the dynamic range unless you’ve chosen to do compression during the processing to a target based on something like RMS rather than just automatically adjusting by the difference between the current maximum peak of the audio file vs peak target. Most software normalizing defaults to peak. You could actually take an audio file with maximum peak at -15dBFS, double its volume by +6dB twice, save it in the same format it was already in, then lower its volume by 12dB, and it’d still be exactly the same original audio data.

Perhaps if all you’re judging it by is dynamic range, but I’d otherwise take umbrage with that considering Engine OS treble roll-off and having 100X the intermodulation distortion of the original 16/44.1 audio you pass through it. I suppose that’s largely separate of the topic of how Engine OS records or normalization works, though.


I don’t own any of the Prime all-in-ones, but doesn’t it just record in situ the exact digital audio at the same digital full scale levels as what you’d see on the computer over the USB from it? If that’s the case, and assuming the master volume control is at unity so you have metering accurately reflecting what the channels and record out are doing, then the top meter LEDs should represent -1dBFS below the brick wall.

So, if that’s all the case, then really lazy or daft users could just run their levels very hot while staying out of the top meter LEDs. That’s what Pete Tong usually does when streaming from home while keeping his inf:1 peak limiter turned on.

Personally, I usually have the streaming software add dither, then boost by 6dB, then have a 1st stage soft limiter, then the hard peak limiter, and instead of running the mixer hotter than I would usually, I just continue to stay out of the second-to-top meter LEDs like I always do for the hottest, least dynamic tracks. That gives me a couple dB of headroom for slip ups even prior to the peak limiter… and I don’t look like a noob with the way I’m running the mixer levels. :innocent:

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