I lately found out that I really don't like non-round numbers in my setups.
I guess I'm doing that for decades now, but just wasn't aware.
Things like I would change an attack setting of 0.9 to 1.0.
Or makeup gain from 7.6db to 8db.

Now that I'm aware of that I will work against it, forcing me to keep the value as it is.
It's just so strange that I never thought about what or why I am doing it.

Anyone else with 'different from the other kids' behavior out there?

 

Just a mild OCD, almost everyone has it to some degree, no need to fight, just embrace the rounded numbers!

 

Humans are not perfect beings—which is precisely why they usually rely on their computers, which appear to be flawless.
Don't go diagnosing it as a mental illness right away, though. It's possible your hearing is simply deteriorating due to age.

 

i'm autistic with ocd tendencies and i surely only move in 1db steps lol, 0.5 if i force myself to not care

 

Dude...sometimes, but not all the time.

You can reset it tho...

Everything you wear turn it inside-out and get comfortable like that, shirts aditionally also front to back!

 

I just use my ears without looking at labels

 

Congratulations?
Dude, you're in the wrong thread

 

I think my only issue like this would be utter frustration with sample pack producers and their overuse of _ all over the place, putting their name in front of the sample, making browsing a pain, using needless subfolder, increasing the time it takes to browse and blowing my email up 3x a day with "hey bro...sup fam....LAST CHANCE!!....You've Unlocked....Limited Time!!!...Only 500 licenses..." and all this other utter nonsense. And stuffing the folders with pointless txt, url etc and so on that I just immediately delete. Having to undo the mess they make can sometimes suck.
And that's what Grinds My Gears

 

Sounds like non-conformism is more the thing here maybe. I can dig that. Trust in the pseudo science.

 

Thankfully not too many neuroses, but I never put a knob/slider to maximum or minimum. It's always like: crank to the fullest... and then gently dial back a bit.

I dunno why but I still do this, even with things like distortion pedals that don't go nearly far enough. Gotta tame them settings down.

 

That's weird, never ran into that myself and I'd rather have to go to therapy than move from a number like 0.93 for attack or something, when that's the sweetspot.

 

I guess I'm on the opposite edge of that, I can spend 5 minutes going back and forth 0.1 values that no listener would even notice. And in the end my mixes still sucks cause I'm probably entirely far away from the sweet spot value :p

 

that´s completely normal for many of us and originates somewhere between the adhd spectrum and the autism spectrum.

i for example love to have hardware units or audio channels 2, 4 or 8 times even when i know that for a certin setup i need exactly 5 or 6.

and when programming code, my code also must look good and have a proper and logical layout, because when it is not beautiful, it is not finished.

a friend recently told me that when he was a kid he hated other kids for scrambling different colors when building stuff with lego bricks.

 

I’ve always used my ears, and settings often ended up at values like 1.23dB, 2.31dB, 3.12dB, or 213kHz, 1243kHz, 2314kHz etc. It became a habit to intentionally stick with those kinds of numbers, as long it works

 

Last edited: May 9, 2026 at 6:05 PM

First, I'm gonna need you to breathe. Let's not go the social media route and lay claim to autism, OCD, PTSD, or PPD.

Seriously, I have a tendencies like that in most avenues of life, and while it is a compulsion to land on numbers that look right, balances that seem fitting, or orders that have an appealing aesthetic, it's only just barely outside whatever "normal" is, if at all. Our monkey brains feel smart for finding patterns, while our more higher synapses turn them into puzzles and try and solve them for greater reward, add to that the fact we're creatures of habit by nature, and that about sums up most low-level forms of compulsion.

Incidentally, I've always played chess, and I've found that the more time I dedicate to playing and studying tactics, strategy, and theory, the more I find my mind is fine allowing me to set "unnatural" looking compression ratios, or overlooking that I'm not EQing to an even frequency (or worse, some number that represents something entirely unrelated,) or not nudging me to order tracks in some fashion that "makes sense," but isn't all that efficient or pragmatic, overall. It's a way for my brain to get that fix outside of producing/mixing.