mixing boards

[aubreyz]

Quote:Yes. What he said. Only louder. One louder. Should have mentioned. I master everything at 11. It's one louder. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akaD9v460yI

[stick]

Naturally. Hey, check out Digidesign's new Guitar Amp plug. It's called Eleven. heh heh.

[ernstinen]

Quote:It's not the gear. It's not the sample rate. It's the music that matters. A great engineer is just making music, not crunching numbers.I completely agree, Aub. The performance, vibe, sounds etc. are the most important thing (and of course, the song! ).What drove me crazy as a demo producer were songwriters who 'thought' they were producers and brought in a fine singer. I would tell the singer to sing a take while I was "tweaking" things. Normally, I was already set to go and the singer's first take was magical, soulful, and perfect for the song.Then the "producer" would start picking it apart. "I want this line sung like this --- you're not emphasizing the lyric properly" etc. We'd start punching the vocal, and it would end up a poor chopped-up version of the first take that was nearly perfect. Guys like this eventually drove me so crazy I closed my studio to outside clients and began concentrating on composing. Much happier, much poorer, but hey, ya gotta do what ya gotta do!Ern

[rcase]

Quote:Yes. What he said. Only louder. One louder.

[elser]

Quote:I'm not sure that I can offer a very scientific explanation to back up my statement. If you look at the frequency response of the human ear, it does not hear all frequencies within the audible range at the same amplitude, there are roll-offs at either end of the spectrum and this situation is exacerbated by factors such as age. One of the reasons for the Loudness button on some receivers (do they still have them?) was to boost the low and high frequencies when the music was playing at a low volume to compensate for the ear's perception of those frequencies at lowered volumes. In other words, the ear does not hear sound in a linear fashion, the response graph is a curve with roll offs at the high and low end and a bump from around 3-6Khz (kind of like the response graph of an SM58 mic). Also, when the ear hears a very loud sound, it starts to distort the sound and compress and shut down. It does not turn off completely like a switch and the graph of the response is probably a steep curve but not a straight line, again a non-linear response.Analog tape does something similar when overloaded, it starts to compress the sound but the response of the tape to the overload is not linear, like the response of the human ear. The tape compression does something to the sound that can be pleasing to the ear, I'm not sure exactly why but my feeling is that it's response to overload is similar to what the ear experiences and we can relate to it.Digital, on the other hand has a pretty ruler flat frequency response (limited by the quality of the Analog to Digital converters, of course, there's analog again!) across the entire audible spectrum which is something that doesn't occur naturally in the analog world (the world we live in). The highest frequency reproducible by the system is determined by the sampling rate. When digital is overloaded, there are no more bits available to reproduce sound so it just shuts down, creating that terrible sound we've all heard. There's no way to creatively overload digital like there is with analog, hence the proliferation of analog tape simulators and tube gear. The sharp edges of digital are due to it's ability to reproduce transient information much more accurately than analog (given good quality converters). For many things, that's a positive improvement over analog, but for a lot of things the ear would rather hear a nicely smeared transient. IMO it's much less stressful on the body.It's hard to put these thoughts in to words and I'm sure I'll get ripped to shreds on some of my wacko theories but I truly think that digital is still striving to provide the warm, fuzzy feeling that analog does by nature. The controversy still rages.MazzMazz, thanks for the reply, sorry I didn't get back to you on this sooner, been 'indisposed'. I guess my overall feeling about the topic is 'would I really consider going back anyway?'....naw. It's my feeling that alot of the supposed superiority of tape is just conditioning anyway,i.e, tape saturation, limited frequency response, etc...those things are really limitations in the medium that we've learned to embrace. I think I'll just keep embracing my limited 24bit, 44.1 system and wait to see what the future brings to it. Elser