Sound card mixer gain steps

The advantage of calibrating the gain steps of your mixer is that WinMLS will automatically compensate by the appropriate number of decibels when you change the mixer volume. This way you will get the correct level independent of the mixer volume settings. Also, if you do not do this and want to maintain the calibration, you must redo the level calibration each time you change the sound card mixer volume (a warning about this will be displayed).

In order to perform mixer calibration, go to Measurement->Sound Card... and in step 3. Select mixer (volume control), make sure  is selected.

Note that this may not be possible on some sound cards since they do not support the Windows mixer. If this is the case, it is not possible or required to calibrate the mixer gain steps, so you can skip this section.

After setting WinMLS to control the Window mixer, click the  button found in step 3d. to calibrate the sound card mixer.

As shown in the figure below you can decide if you want to define the gain steps of your mixer.

The advantage of using  is that WinMLS will automatically compensate by the appropriate number of decibels when you change the volumes of the mixer. Thereby you always get the correct level of your measurement.

If you see the name of your sound card in the ’gain steps’ list shown below, you can select it and do not need to run the procedure for making a new gain steps file.

If you want to make a new gain steps file, click the  button. The dialog box shown below will be opened.

This procedure may take a few minutes.

Only channel 1 is used to find the mixer gain steps. This means that if you are measuring using both channels and the mixer gain steps in channel 1 is not equal to channel 2, there will be an error in the result.

If the level is too high to do the calibration, which may be the case if you are calibrating a microphone input, you should reduce the output calibration level [dBFS]. It can be set in the range 0 dB to – 60 dB, an example is shown in the figure below.