# What is gain staging?

Setting the level sensibly at every step — microphone, recorder, edit, export — so nothing is so quiet it picks up hiss or so loud it clips. Get it roughly right at the start and every later step gets easier.

Every stage of a chain has a comfortable range. Too quiet and you amplify the noise floor along with the voice later; too loud and you clip. Gain staging is the unglamorous habit of keeping each stage in its range instead of fixing everything at the end.

For a podcast it comes down to two decisions. Set the mic gain so normal speech peaks around −6 dB, and resist making it louder because the meter looks lonely. Then leave the finished loudness to the export, where it is measured against a target rather than guessed.

That is why Cast asks for a platform at export rather than a volume: the whole episode is measured and matched in one pass, which works properly only if the recording underneath it was neither clipped nor buried in noise.

**Let the export handle the loudness:** Pick where you publish and Cast measures the episode and matches the target, instead of you guessing from a meter. https://mubert.com/tools/cast/upload

## Related

- [What is clipping, and what is headroom?](https://mubert.com/tools/cast/docs/what-is-clipping)
- [What is LUFS?](https://mubert.com/tools/cast/docs/what-is-lufs)
- [How loud should my podcast be?](https://mubert.com/tools/cast/docs/how-loud-should-podcast-be)

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Source: https://mubert.com/tools/cast/docs/what-is-gain-staging · Cast docs
Last updated: 2026-09-14