Compander for recording output?

[Arlin]

Our new sound system is using an LS9-32 sound console.
Our new sound system has LOTS of headroom, which is a good thing for the live sound.

BUT, all that head room can make our recordings very soft.
I am thinking using a compander on the LS9's recorded mix looks like it was made just for this sort of thing.
...any general suggestions?

Attached is a pretty aggressive graph for a compander... It pushes the gain up in the mid volume ranges, where most of the action happens.
Expansion keeps the noise floor low.
Compression prevents clipping and distortion.
Am I on the right track?

[pdc]

Pretty much. You want to increase the RMS almost to the peak, reducing dynamic range. The downside is that the ambient noise will increase. If you have a dead, quiet room, you will have a pretty good recording with lots of level. If you have a live room with lots of air conditioning noise, etc, then you are going to have to get creative.

Your sound system should not be set up so that you have little to no gain on your channel strips. Your amplifiers and speaker management (or analog crossover, etc) are not set up correctly. You need to decrease the sensitivity on your speaker processing, not your amps (unless the amps are not properly matched for your drivers). Whomever set that up needs a lesson in sampling/analog to digital conversion.

0dB in analog on the Yamaha is -20 dBBFS. If you hit that, you will have plenty of headroom. You will crap out the mic pre before the A/D on the Yamaha. Once you get the HA levels set, you can focus on metering on other things. There are multiple ways and places to monitor levels on the LS9. You can monitor pre or post-fader levels on the input channels, and then high pass filter or pre-fader.

[Arlin]

I played with this a little last night during praise team practice and ended up with the following settings on the recording output mix:
Compander-S (which sets the Expansion Ratio = 1.5)
Compression Ratio = 4
Threshold = -24
Width = 11
Out Gain = 0
Attack = ~24 ms (IIRC)
Release = ~200 ms (IIRC)

I tried the Compander-H, which fixes the expansion ratio at 5, but that made the expansion sound too much like a hard gate with noise fluttering on & off during quiet periods.
I wish I had more expansion ratio options between 1.5 & 5.....

[pdc]

Do you have compressors on the individual channels as well? Maybe you can compress a little more on the channel and increase the make-up gain, and gain some smoothness.

[pdc]

BTW, used Aphex Compellors or Dominators would be a great thing to put in front of any broadcast or recording device.