Point of attack number one (after making sure you are actually use phono input if that is what your TT puts out or line if the TT is line) is to gain/trim. As we advise here, you should 0dB gain your tracks, meaning the 0dB light is on just about continuously (certainly on modern digital dance music) with the peaks in the track hitting the second light regularly. This is, on many mixers and controllers usually somewhere in the 10 to 1 o’clock position of the trim/gain knob. Switching to phono this should give you PLENTY of headroom to get the phone input to the same level.
Clearly if the DJ before you has been running the mixer hot, with both channel and master meters in the red, there is no headroom left to play with unfortunately. All the previous DJ managed to do is show his/her ignorance, mess up the system and audience for you and – most likely – made the house technician angry
Track gaining is something you should do with EVERY track, regardless of the source. It’s very good practice as you may not always be in the presence of a system that automatically does the gaining for you and/or the automatic gaining might not be all that good.
Even if you follow the above, you will run into something else though, the results of what is known as “the loudness war”.
In order to claim as many listeners for their radio stations as possible, people started using compressors to make tracks sound “louder” and more energetic. While compressors certainly have that effect, they also have one very bad side-effect, namely that the dynamic range (the difference in dB between the softest and loudest parts of a track) is totally gone and the track sounds loud but flat as a pancake. Most modern dance tracks will have a dynamic range of sometimes less than 3dB!
Old (vinyl) music was created with a far wider dynamic range, making it more “alive”. Unfortunately if you were to track gain a vinyl track the same way you would a modern digital track, the vinyl one would always SOUND (perception of the DJ and audience) less loud, even if the peaks run at the same level.
The only direct technical solution to this would be to run your phono channels through a compressor, bringing it within the same dynamic range as digital music (and taking away the dynamic range). Not very practical unless you only play on/with your own gear. And even then, track compression is a sound engineering tool and not something you can do with “1-touch” settings.
If you like vinyl for the feel and the gear and don’t care too much if the music is on vinyl, going DVS is obviously an option as you would manipulate your tracks the way you would with regular vinyl, but the sound output would be from digital music from your DJ software.
Hope that helps some.
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