my friend has a digital multi effect for his guitar.
its output sound sucks.
if i put a tube preamp between multi effect and guitar amp, will it sound better?
im lookin for a more...analog...smooth...sound.
is it possible?
thx in advance
its output sound sucks.
if i put a tube preamp between multi effect and guitar amp, will it sound better?
im lookin for a more...analog...smooth...sound.
is it possible?
thx in advance
you will never get rid of the digital sound which is probably why the output sound sucks... no matter how many tubes you use. even analogue modeling pedals still sound digital for the very reason of there being a DAC to convert analogue into digital, and then back again... problem is, even the most expensice DAC's still can;t avoid that digital sound... what's in your friends effects is probably far from expensive, and therefore, sounds very digital...
to think of one major problem of digital, think of sampling and bit rates, effecting frequency and dynamic range... sound is altered hugely here, and you loose a lot of quality... like comparing a digital photo to a photo on film... you still make out the same image, but the one on film retains much more detail.. both colour depth and image quality, whereas a digital shot pixilates and looses a lot of colour depth.
yes, as long as it's a good preamp, and you're not driving it into clipping while you're meant to be playing clean undistorted sounds, then you will warm the sound up if the preamp is designed for this...
can you get;
analogue? --> no
smooth --> more than before, but you will still hear that digital sound...
to think of one major problem of digital, think of sampling and bit rates, effecting frequency and dynamic range... sound is altered hugely here, and you loose a lot of quality... like comparing a digital photo to a photo on film... you still make out the same image, but the one on film retains much more detail.. both colour depth and image quality, whereas a digital shot pixilates and looses a lot of colour depth.
yes, as long as it's a good preamp, and you're not driving it into clipping while you're meant to be playing clean undistorted sounds, then you will warm the sound up if the preamp is designed for this...
can you get;
analogue? --> no
smooth --> more than before, but you will still hear that digital sound...
Sorry Benny, that's complete bullsh1t. You're not providing any figures to back up your statements, just a load of handwaving. Please tell us how the ADC process affects dynamic range and frequency response, considering that there are plenty of DACs and ADCs that will do 120dB dynamic range without problems, and with a frequency response flat to 90kHz (192kHz sampling).
As for digital photography, you should check out a proper camera, not a £10 webcam. The gamut of a decent CCD easily comparable to film stock, and with resolutions of 10mega pixels and up, the resolution is on par with 35mm.
Fair enough, someone may have a preference for analogue sound (I should know, I have two superb tube monoblocks in my hi-fi), but please don't try to tell us about technical benefits that just don't exist. m'kay? 😉
i made this statement and discussed digital in respect to this consideration...
i am predicting this guys dac is far from 90kHz considering it's in guitar effects, which for the most part use cheap parts because the manufacturers know they're not making audio equipment that is going to be judged by discerning audio engineers and the likes... more likely just your average guitarist who's playing through some 30W practice amp and wants something to colour their sound a bit more...
i'm predicting a sampling rate closer to 30kHz.. i looked up the manual for an amp modeler i have, and despite having a bit rate of 24bits, it has a 'sampling rate' of 31.25 kHz... i don't know what frequncy response this gives, but i'm guessing it's not terribly good... and think of this like putting together a puzzle... so many times a seccond, you're dac takes a snapshot of that time period, but it must join the pieces together... i doubt there is a 'perfect' dac that can do this 100% error free... some can probably do it better than others, and this is probably why you can pay more for another dac with the same bit and sampling rates... because one does it's job better than the other...
hate to tell you that this is complete bullsh1t... the fact that you can put a pixel value on it shows you've already lost quality compared with 35mm which has an almost infinite resolution (up to a limit, then the image looses sharpness, but this is only when blown up to be HUGE... like say with dimensions comparable to a 747 plane)
As far as checking out propper cameras, i'm guessing that the fact that as a media student who's using digital cameras worth close to 10 grand each that use 3 of those decent CCD's you talk about per camera (comonly known as 3CCD) that i dont have any idea do i??? resolution aside, and without talking about other things that ocour in motion cameras such as interlacing and what not, you still loose a lot of colour quality. Even HDTV format does not compare with film. we can even start to discuss motion, as capturing sound is like capturing motion... even though these cameras shoot in 'frame' mode, which is similar to film in that unlike most digital cameras they do not interlace frames, the motion still never compares to film... even after using something like FilmFX which is a digital film simulator, it still dont compare if you look closely... it comes close, but still not quite.
if i somehow implied all digital is bad, i didn't mean this.. i was discussing digital in repect to his friends effects... so maybe comparing 10 pound web cams with more expensive ones is a fair analogy to make in this case.
cheers
Unfortunate analogy
Gentlemen, I'm afraid that comparing digital and analogue audio with 35mm film and CCD cameras is an unfortunate analogy. Sony would have you believe that their best cameras equal the performance of 35mm film - of course they would, broadcast budgets have fallen through the floor, whereas the film industry can afford to spend far more money on cameras. However, the CCD vs 35mm issue is hotly contested, with the film supportors pointing out that film has an S-shaped transfer characteristic (giving gentle compression at the top and bottom of the range), and that film grain is random, whereas CCD sampling is fixed. Conversely, the CCD supportors point out that video uses cheap re-useable stock. The debate rages back and forth...
Regarding stills cameras, I have a Nikon F4 (35mm body) and a Nikon D100 (digital body). Admittedly, the D100 isn't the best digital body on offer, but it's not bad. Using the D100 confirms my broadcast experience - exposure is hugely critical compared to film, and I wouldn't dare have a poster sized print made.
Having strayed dangerously off-topic, where does this leave us regarding digital musical effects?
ADC and DAC manufacturers claiming 120dB dynamic range habitually apply "A" weighting to their noise-shaping convertors to obtain such a nice number. I would imagine that different guitars produce different outputs, but the effects pedal needs to be able to cope with all of them without clipping. That means that the quieter guitars must be much closer to the digital noise floor of the convertors. Further, I'd be very surprised if digital effects pedals have beautifully low jitter clocks and correctly applied dither.
To sum up, the principles of A/D conversion and DSP are fine, but the implementation is often flawed, especially in "price sensitive" markets.
Gentlemen, I'm afraid that comparing digital and analogue audio with 35mm film and CCD cameras is an unfortunate analogy. Sony would have you believe that their best cameras equal the performance of 35mm film - of course they would, broadcast budgets have fallen through the floor, whereas the film industry can afford to spend far more money on cameras. However, the CCD vs 35mm issue is hotly contested, with the film supportors pointing out that film has an S-shaped transfer characteristic (giving gentle compression at the top and bottom of the range), and that film grain is random, whereas CCD sampling is fixed. Conversely, the CCD supportors point out that video uses cheap re-useable stock. The debate rages back and forth...
Regarding stills cameras, I have a Nikon F4 (35mm body) and a Nikon D100 (digital body). Admittedly, the D100 isn't the best digital body on offer, but it's not bad. Using the D100 confirms my broadcast experience - exposure is hugely critical compared to film, and I wouldn't dare have a poster sized print made.
Having strayed dangerously off-topic, where does this leave us regarding digital musical effects?
ADC and DAC manufacturers claiming 120dB dynamic range habitually apply "A" weighting to their noise-shaping convertors to obtain such a nice number. I would imagine that different guitars produce different outputs, but the effects pedal needs to be able to cope with all of them without clipping. That means that the quieter guitars must be much closer to the digital noise floor of the convertors. Further, I'd be very surprised if digital effects pedals have beautifully low jitter clocks and correctly applied dither.
To sum up, the principles of A/D conversion and DSP are fine, but the implementation is often flawed, especially in "price sensitive" markets.
electro samurai said:
The best option is to arrange the multieffects to be in a
send return loop of the amplifier so it is working at line
level rather the low guitar input levels.
🙂 sreten.
maybe another not so good analogy... i think using this would be more like something you'd use in an analogy comparing tube and solid state audio clipping... not really relating to conversions because this is talking more about colour added to the image your analogy, not how much of the image is actualy recorded... this is one of the beautiful things about film, just like tubes, the colour they add makes them nicer to look/listen too... there is also the whole side of films ability to capture far more information, which is closer to what i was trying to get a cross... for example, go and point a digital (motion, not still) camera at a whole lot of green leaves on a bush being blown by a strong wind, and then point a film camera, and see which one records it better... the digital camera has trouble recording this as well as film, because it's trying to record an infinite amount of information and put a finite limit on it...
but anyway... all of our not so good analogies aside, i only bought up the digital photography thing becuase it is another case of trying to convert waves (this time light) into a whole lot of 1's and 0's... and the amount of data that can be stored, and the integrity of this data is inherently limited because of digital trying to record and almost 'infinte' thing as something finite...
of course, there is the cases of high quality equipment, but a digital guitar effect is generally not going to have the best dac unless you go using something more up market like one of the G-Force units, but i can't see many people justifying the big money to buy one of these unless they're an absolutely serious musician as their job.... can't see anyone who's not a muso by trade, or a very rich hobyist forking for something like that... this is where i was coming from.
exactly... if a good quality DAC is used, while it's still not going to retain all of the original signals quality, it will probably retain more than what the average human ear can discern.
cheers
benny said:
Exactly my point! It's not that digital has inferior specs in any way to analogue, but that it doesn't add pleasant alterations to the signal...
Nooooooooo. Depends on the film stock... an ISO 50 film is going to have much lower grain than an ISO800 stock. They have different uses, ISO50 would be excellent for portraits in a studio, but useless for night shots or sports photography.
If fillm had infinite detail, we'd be using super 8 for IMAX presentations.
Are you saying that a film camera will record an infinite amount of information? Maybe we've stumbled across a new law of physics 😉
Try recording a bullet flying through the air with a 24fps film camera, best quality film you can get. If your theory is correct, you will have a copy of every nanosecond of the exact flightpath of the bullet, in infinite resolution (down to the atomic level at least). If you can't record it, then you are losing information i.e. you have a FINITE level of detail.
And again, you could say the the average Joe is going to be using a compact 35mm camera, with cheap plastic lenses.
😀 At last, I think we can agree on something here. There is no such thing as being able to record an infinite amount of information... you're always going to lose something, whether it's in the temoral domain (things happening in between the frames of a film), or in the detail you capture in each frame.
The best we can hope for is to capture enough to fool the human eye/ear into believing what it detects is a good approximation to the real world.
Arnie
it also adds unpleasant alterations... not so important for guitar, but in hifi where every bit of distortion counts, AD/DA conversion contributes a fair bit to the total system distortion... but then again, i guess the needle on a record player also contributes to distortion, which comes back to that same thing of 'nice' colourations.... probably why a well cut record sounds far better than CD.
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