Recorded .WAV files .... What do the Color Differences mean (?)

[BenIfin]

Hey all !

This is a very minor thing but I've never known how to "interpret" its meaning .. if it has any at all.

The Pic Below is from the latest version of Audacity - the clips are two Plexi's from 2 different modelers dialled-in to sound essentially "identical" but both using the same identical IR and IR settings ... interface used to record is an RME UCX.

Clip No. 1 is Balanced XLR-Out to Balanced XLR-In <= Input 1 on the RME

Clip No. 2 Un-BALANCED 1/4-Out to Un-BALANCED 1/4-In <= Input 3 on the RME

Clip No. 2 has -less- light blue and -more- dark blue than Clip No 1 ... during playback they both average out and peak at pretty much identical DB levels.

Does this mean that Clip No. 2 is showing a greater dynamic range than Clip No.1 ?

-or-

Is it just meaningless graphical rendering by the Audacity rendering engine ?

Ben

 

[Lysander]

It's peak values vs. RMS, at any point in the waveform.

See https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/audacity_waveform.html for details.

 

[Ed DeGenaro]

Why the interest in dynamic range?
Let’s start here dynamic range is the distance between the loudest sound gear can produce before distortion and the quietest before being drowned by the noise floor.

Now since guitars, even clean sounds have distortion (even if we don’t perceive them as such). The peaks will get chopped off the more it distorts turning the sine into a square wave.