For sure a sibilant voice or hi hat can be very distracting. I don't have much of a problem with digital and sibilance but some recordings it can sneak through on the hi hats or you can get the same type of distortions from a bad dynamic range processor and a monitoring environment that doesn't reveal the flaw to the mixer. It's what I call a random phase distortion. You will have a stable image that all of a sudden because of the distortion wraps around and mis-localizes in a frequency dependent fashion.
Bass to me is tricky. I feel like this is one area where I really don't know what I should be targeting. I think you can get different kinds of bass depending on transient or lack of transient information being conveyed in the playback system. You will see fans of dipoles talk about it. But I think there can be this overly punchy bass from speakers and also a sort of hazy bass that is more "roundish" or "O-ish"
Again my request for an up-to-date synth reverb recording with good imaging. Can I write decoded lossless files on CD with a freeware program? If so it would be nice if someone could send me one. If I needn't pay anything it could also be pop.
It's hard for me to pick just a couple but these two come to mind. I like how in the Common song for most of it you can't exactly hear the reverbs but they are effecting the 3-D imaging. Notice that the phantom center channel is elevated in height on a good set of monitors. Instead of coming from the same vertical location on the horizontal axis the center should appear to come from above the screen. I guess I just like how they play with the reverb in the second one.
Common - I Am Music
Medeski, Martin, and Wood - Midnight Poppies/Crooked Birds
I usually use foobar 2000 to convert lossless to wav and then just use EAC with a cue sheet to burn the CD. If you have your CD drive setup with the proper read offset and write offset and you are ripping securely your back up copy should be a 1:1 exact copy.
To make one thing clear:
I am not publicly outing myself here as someone who wants to "steal" music. As the icon implies I was indending to throw it in the bin after testing. But meanwhile I have a much easier solution anyway: My kitchen radio has chinch outputs and I will connect it to my system. I have no FM receiver in my system because the Bavarian classical channel can only be received at bad quality in my region and satellite radio is a mess anyway. But I can listen to a pop channel and compare the various songs.
Why do it easy when you can have it complicated.
I am not publicly outing myself here as someone who wants to "steal" music. As the icon implies I was indending to throw it in the bin after testing. But meanwhile I have a much easier solution anyway: My kitchen radio has chinch outputs and I will connect it to my system. I have no FM receiver in my system because the Bavarian classical channel can only be received at bad quality in my region and satellite radio is a mess anyway. But I can listen to a pop channel and compare the various songs.
Why do it easy when you can have it complicated.
One has to note that there are alot of different styles of synth reverb up to reverbs that are sampled from real spaces and are probably not distinguishable from the real ones. As for samples, why not check out the manufacturers demo pages?
I like the sound of this one: ArtsAcoustic | because sound matters
I like the sound of this one: ArtsAcoustic | because sound matters
Thanks a lot for the link. I will try it. Very good is that they say the algorithm doesn't contain convolution. Probably it is a bit vague when they say a reverb eats a lot of CPU. David Griesinger (the one from Lexicon) writes that the main problem is the memory access that is much more efficient in his custom chips.
I want to add, just in case, that all reverbs do basically the same thing. They layer delayed copies of the original signal (thats why one can build reverb like sounds with simple echo effects if one shortens the delay enough). Sometimes, the copies are eq'ed or filtered. Even a convolution reverb doesnt do different, just the pattern of when which sound is played is copied from a natural source. Synthetical reverbs usually achieve these patterns with feedback networks.
I tested them and I find the less wet examples quite natural for an "algorithmic" reverb. But for all of them nothing like a sticking to the speakers or a clump of mud between or anything annoying.
There was one thing however I found very strange:
The sources are moving extremely when my head moves, a matter of centimeters.
I listened to the examples of the Quantec Yardstick (the new one with roomsize parameter) some time ago, I think I have written about it earlier in the thread, and in contrast I found that especially the more wet examples sounded more like real rooms. But this algorithm is so CPU-eating that there is still no PC that could handle it alone.
I am not going to visit the sites of all reverb manufacturers, but I now believe Markus that mastering can do a lot of harm.
BTW,
Markus, are you still around?
It would be nice if you could tell us something about these "esoteric effects"? I think when the term "mastering" is used most of us only think about compression.
A bit OT, but listen to the "get voice out of head" clip with headphones.
QUANTEC - Zero Artifact Room Simulation: Sound Clips
QUANTEC - Zero Artifact Room Simulation: Sound Clips
What the SPL Vitalizer does sounds dangerous:
"Und jetzt aufpassen: Mit Hilfe von komplexen Filterschaltungen vierter Ordnung erzeugt der Vitalizer frequenz-und amplitudenabhängige Verzögerungen (Phasenverschiebungen) bis zu einem Bereich von gut fünf Millisekunden. Das je nach Frequenzbereich und Pegel unterschiedlich stark verzögerte Signal wird dem Originalsignal zugemischt. Dadurch werden u.a. die Impulse der Höhen teilweise verbreitert, zum Teil aber auch die Mitten durch Phasenauslöschungen bedämpft. Das Gehör erhält die lnformationen der verschiedenen Freqeunzbereiche nicht mehr zeitgleich, sondern in Portionen nacheinander, so daß es sie der Reihe nach „verstehen“ kann, Maskierungen, also ein „Übertönen“ bestimmter Frequenzbereiche durch lautere, dominierende Frequenzen wird ausgeschlossen. Dadurch entsteht der Eindruck räumlicher Tiefe und einer schärferen Differenziertheit des Klangbildes."
And any village studio can afford this device.
Sorry, I couldn't find an English explaination.
Sad that the Lexicon reverb examples are only available as Youtube stuff, so I only listened to them only with headphones from my computer, but I believe the Chamber algorithm could be fine for ancient music:
Product: PCM Native Reverb Plug-in Bundle | Lexicon Pro
Sorry, I know all this is getting very very very OT.
yes very true. unfortunate however that mostly all but a few 'classical music' orchestral recordings have the bass mixed down to mono below about 100hz, as im no fan of orchestral music.
Bass below 80 Hz does not affect spatial attributes of sound reproduction in acoustically small spaces. See Martens et al., 2004.
Best, Markus
with studio recordings at least, Im certain that most studios would not use 2 mics for recording the output from a bass amp, or also in many cases a guitar amp either. stereo guitar is often done with 2 mics and 2 amps simultaneously, or just multitracked and recorded twice. stereo elec bass may also just by DI'ed in alot of cases, provided its of any use to record in stereo, eg if a flanger/phaser is used for EFX and a fuller harmonic structure(or exagerated one) is desired. A 'Dark' bass with little overtones wouldnt really be noticable in stereo unless it is panned left to right, rather than ACTUAL stereo recording.
presumably to reduce stylus clipping at large displacements?
Bang on the money Markus
Not a cutter but I'll take a guess. Basically even if it is true that bass transients are somewhat benign (debatable but not getting into it) the truth is that a lot of material will have bass transient and reflection information present on the recording. Bass is the largest wave so it will be the largest groves. When a sound is in phase it will cut horizontally. If a sound is out of phase it will cut vertically. When both are present as in bass transient information it's more of a circular movement that can pop the needle out of the grove.