Guide

How to gain-match an outboard chain

Send a mix through analog gear and it rarely comes back at the same level. Left and right rarely stay balanced, either. Here is why that matters, and how to fix it in one click.

Why match

Louder sounds better. If your gear returns the mix even a little hotter, it wins every comparison, whether it helped or not. Matching the level is the only way to hear what the chain really did.

Balance moves too. No two channels of analog gear are identical, so a chain can pull the image to one side. A send that is too hot can also clip your converters before the gear does anything.

Matching by ear or with a test tone is slow, and a tone does not behave like music. The match has to be made on the music itself.

With two instances

Mac and Windows

  1. Put one Trim before your hardware insert and set its Role to Source. Put another on the insert's return and set it to Analyzer. Give both the same Bus.
  2. Play the music, including its loudest part, until Match lights up.
  3. Choose a Mode. Image fixes only the balance. Full also undoes the chain's level change. Drive raises the level as far as your ceilings allow.
  4. Choose a Weighting. Perceptual judges level the way you hear it and ignores distortion the chain adds. Flat counts every frequency equally.
  5. Set DA dBTP for your converters. It is the highest true peak Match will send them, and it is on by default.
  6. Press Match on either Trim. The correction goes on the Source, before the chain, so your gear gets the balanced signal.

Changed a setting on the hardware? Press Reset and play the passage again. To match several chains in one session, give each its own Bus.

With one instance

macOS

Switch Trim to Single and it runs the whole loop from one track. Choose the Output pair your gear is wired to and the Input pair it comes back on. Then press Ping. Ping measures the round trip, and Trim reports it to your DAW so the session stays in time. Then match as above. On Windows, use two Trims.

Reading the result

The result plot shows what is left after the match. Flat means the chain only changed the level. A slope means it changed the tone. A rise at the top means it added distortion. The clip counters show clipping going out and coming back. A chain that clips cannot hide behind a clean match.

Trim is free. It comes as AU, VST3 and standalone on macOS, and as VST3 and standalone on Windows.