first iriver ihp120 rockbox recording due tonight - help with settings please

[severin]

hi,

i've recently switched to the rockbox firmware and tonight i'll be (stealth-) recording my first gig with it. it's going to be a pretty loud rock-show (smashing pumpkins in an 10000 seat arena). i'm planning to use some phantom powered coresound clone mics and a -20db attentuator cable so i don't overload the iriver.

now i've read into the recording options and into some threads on here, and based on the comments there i'll use the safety agc setting with 1 second agc clip time

my biggest problem is, that i have no clear idea on the gain setting to use. how high would you set it with the aforementioned rig in the described setting?

thanks in advance
severin

[severin]

just to let you know how it went, and for future reference: i set the gain to +35, didn't clip once, and it turned out a bit to low on the volume side, but still good enough...

[petur]

it always depends on the incoming signal.
Looks like you can drop that -20dB attenuator

I use an st-9100 from Church Audio and I set the preamp so that highest peaks ever seen  so far are above 5dB. At start I set the gain to +15dB and if the show turns out to be louder than expected, AGC Safety will deal with it...

Setting the preamp is a bit of guessing, you might have some bad shows at the start until you get a feeling of the right values to use.

Even the very good stealth recorders started off with bad recordings, you just learn and get better