Hey Guys, I've got some audio questions, bear with me, I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed with technical stuff, but hear (get it? hah hah) goes...

Is it okay to uses 16 bit mode even though It says you can only get 2 channels, does it matter if I'm going to dump it down to Vegas? I do want have another track of ambience(people tell I can mix that with my dialogue) and a musical score.

I'm recording dialogue with an external hypercardiod mic and I've set the signals of the mic to input 2 jack and set both ch1 and ch2 select select swtiches to input 2 postion. Should I use MIC ALC? I don't want to really compress it.

People have said to use a headphone booster as well, Is it because the sound is to weak to hear on the dvx? I record some test dialogue and it had it so the audio meters were just breaking into the red. Or should I use the 10 db attachment on the MIC(which I didn't use). It sounded fine through the mdr-7506's but when I listened to it on the CPU, I had to turn almost up to full blast to hear it(some hissing) as well. How do know how loud it is actually with the meters, cause I had the them just breaking the reds, even though it was so quiet, I can assume that my first mistake was to use cpu speakers to hear it...
Okay I'm done blabbering, please help guys,
Thanks
Neil

3 reds showing is -6db... get your average peaks to hit 3 reds... turn ALC on. It doesn't control the volume like AGC does... it only introduces limiters as needed. If you're in a well-controlled shoot and you know that peaks won't light up past 4 reds then you can get by without ALC, but 99% of the time it's not worth the risk.

The meters just break the reds at -12db... that is just too quiet.

I always use 16bit mode... that gives you the cleanest recording. The only reason to NOT use 16bit is when you want to add audio to audio that's already on the tape... Just add more tracks in your NLE and keep the sound perfect. 16bit.

Thanks Matt, Nothing Like receiving good news when you come to work in the morning... Do you use a boostaroo?