This button will let you see the actual signal strength by looking at the LEDs on the board. For this purpose, many boards come with a PFL (Pre-Fader Listen) button. You’ll want to set this gain level high enough to bring up the level of the signal, but not so high that you’ll get clipping or distortion in the signal. It’s the first control that the raw mic signal sees, and it will boost the signal to a sufficient level for the rest of the controls to work properly. On the mixer board, you’ll see the gain at the top of the board.
These both mean the same thing as far as electronics go, but serve different purposes in each. One of them is on your mixer board or PA, and the other is on a guitar amp. For the curious, here’s the equation to calculate gain:įor all non-rocket scientist purposes, you’re probably going to see a gain control in two places. This could be the increase in the raw signal from your guitar or microphone before it goes into any of the other electronic components. This increase is almost always expressed in dB (decibels). Typically when referring to gain, we refer to transmission gain, which is the increase in the power of the signal. So for example, you can have a power gain, voltage gain, or current gain and they all increase those respective values.
Quite simply it means an increase in some kind of value.
Gain is one of the harder terms to define, mainly because its used in a lot more places than just the audio world. But, it’s pretty important stuff to understand if you want to get a good sound from your equipment. On top of that, you might have channel volume, master volume, guitar volume, fader levels, guitar amp gain, mixer board gain … etc. Probably because you’ll see them often, and two or three on the same piece of equipment! That can seriously make your brain want to go flip upside-down and jump into a pool of boiling acoustic particle velocity soup. When working with sound amplification equipment, we often misuse these terms.
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