It's quite rare to find a sound card and amplification system that can actually deliver DC. These are usually specialised DACs for control applications. Regular audio equipment uses DC blocking capacitors (analogue high-pass) that won't admit anything much below 5-10Hz.
All the same, if you are using an experimental signal processing system like Pd or any other computer music language along with high power amplification for a live audience, it is sensible to add a compressor/limiter at the end of the chain. For the sake of your audience rather than the speakers.
This should be a separate piece of hardware, not part of the software system that could fail.
On Mon, 1 Dec 2008 08:50:41 -0500 "Spencer Russell" spencer.f.russell@gmail.com wrote:
Most of my live performance work involves realtime processing of upright bass, and I find myself often using a lot of very short variable IIR taps (delays with feedback).
I use either my 500-watt bass amp or the house PA as output.
Right now I don't have any explicit patchage to make sure I'm not pumping out any signal that's straining the amplification system, and if I watch my speakers as I play I often see them popping in and out in a distressing fashion.
I'm thinking I should start including some basic speaker protection into the output stage of my patches, mostly a limiter and highpass filter to get rid of any sub-audio and DC signal.
Is this necessary? I assume that either the output of the firebox or the input of my amplification setup is AC-coupled and should be getting rid of DC anyways, but we all know what happens when you assume.
Are other people using speaker protection patches? Anything more sophisticated than the classic [hip~ 5] before the output?
-spencer
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