|
Post by svart on May 17, 2024 13:04:28 GMT -6
When I see these things, it always makes me think “someone” decided they could increase profit margins by having China build it for them, thinking they are climbing some ladder of wealth. And after the first run, the factory over there is like.. “well we could just sell these ourselves and make more profit than being hired out” That's how places like Alctron ended up doing their own line of audio gear..
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 17, 2024 10:53:51 GMT -6
I might be inclined to think the Alctrons might be more "authentic" to the original design. Pics of the 540 guts look much less cluttered and the transformers look more like copies in terms of size/shape/build than the "midas" transformers in the Berhringer.
A bit tangential, but I got the N-Sonic (Alctron) 1073, and I thought it sounded great but felt that it had a little bit less high end extension and not so focused mids compared to the AML ez1073. After reading the manual of the GAP Pre-73, of which the Alctron is a copy, I realized that it comes with the 600 ohm termination by default. I switched it to the normal termination and lo and behold, I can't tell them apart. It's a bit crazy because the Alctron is using bargain-basement transformers while the AML has Carnhills.
I mention this because, isn't the 2254 basically a 1073 plus the diode bridge, or something like that? (I'm no EE). Maybe Alctron nailed it. I need to try the 540.
I think people really overblow the "magic" from certain parts. It's more important that the sum of the parts is equivalent in overall design and function. And yes, the 2254 is essentially a 1073 preamp with the diode bridge and another interstage transformer.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 16, 2024 13:58:14 GMT -6
Having built a 33609/2254, the biggest issue would be calibration and potential drift. It's hard to get these things calibrated correctly. Did you see all those pots on the board in the video? There's like a dozen pots that need to be set and a lot of them can only be set in a certain order or it won't work. I'd fear that the cheapness would eventually show up in parts drifting in tolerance and the calibration going out of whack. It's possible they scaled the circuit values to mitigate how touchy the pot settings are, but I doubt it. Welp, there goes my plan of buying 2x Alctron 540s to have an ersatz 33609. I might be inclined to think the Alctrons might be more "authentic" to the original design. Pics of the 540 guts look much less cluttered and the transformers look more like copies in terms of size/shape/build than the "midas" transformers in the Berhringer.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 16, 2024 8:29:01 GMT -6
I is not smart when it comes to the ‘tronics, but won’t there be some impedance/phase blah blah tronicky-talk bad things that will happen with that Y cable at around 12:00? Phase would be an issue if the mics were both wired identically and the cable was wired 1:1. You'd need to swap the two signal pins on one of the XLRs so that the mics would remain in relative phase. Impedance would be much less of an issue with most mics I would think, but it does raise an interesting question.. When you have two coils driving a circuit, they would interact with each other to some degree, in some kind of push-pull arrangement. It might affect their response, but I'm not sure in what way. There shouldn't be any issues with two mics driving a single mic pre though. I've done it myself for fun over the years and never really experienced a problem. It just wasn't really a solution either since I couldn't adjust the levels independently.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 16, 2024 8:00:22 GMT -6
Are those the actual specs? Seems way too low for a powered condenser mic that was probably copied from one of the usual circuits unless they did it for a reason, or used a weird output transformer.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 16, 2024 7:57:09 GMT -6
My biggest worry with this would maybe be the noise. Diode bridges are a little noisier to begin with, and I could see that maybe being an issue with this Behringer box. Having built a 33609/2254, the biggest issue would be calibration and potential drift. It's hard to get these things calibrated correctly. Did you see all those pots on the board in the video? There's like a dozen pots that need to be set and a lot of them can only be set in a certain order or it won't work. I'd fear that the cheapness would eventually show up in parts drifting in tolerance and the calibration going out of whack. It's possible they scaled the circuit values to mitigate how touchy the pot settings are, but I doubt it.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 11, 2024 10:25:34 GMT -6
Ok, I might be completely wrong, but delay compensation sees the delay on a plug-in and then offsets every OTHER track so that they're all equally delayed and therefore still in sync, right?
So yeah, if you had a plug with a really high delay (Soothe, melodyne, reverbs, etc) then yeah you'll always hear a delay.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 10, 2024 12:46:01 GMT -6
Polywav? Never heard of it. Sounds like a way to always have compatibility issues with other DAWs. I just import a block of consolidated files and snap them to the marker in Reaper. Then I can just grab and move them to the places in my template I want them. Takes a few minutes and I don't have to work in someone else's template. I never have issues lining the files up quickly unless someone screwed up the consolidation. Polywav files are the standard in NLEs for video editing. It actually is very convenient there. If you record, say, a boom mic and a lav mic during an interview, the two files are packaged together so you can easily switch between them (or blend them), but they never can accidentally slip from one another. In a way, it's kind of like recording a stereo file vs. two mono files. Except a polywav can contain more than two channels. I do wish that all DAWs supported it, though, because audio editing is still much easier in DAWs than in NLEs. I'm pretty sure Reaper supports it. I mean, Reaper supports like everything. I gotta really give it an honest try someday. You still using it, svart? Oh yeah. Love it more than ever now. I've branched out and started using a handful of the more advanced (for me) features and I just can't see how any other DAW can even compare in features. Anyway, the video editing I've done, I always have to unlock the audio tracks and line them up manually because nobody ever checks phase on boom/lav mic..
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 10, 2024 7:50:39 GMT -6
Polywav? Never heard of it. Sounds like a way to always have compatibility issues with other DAWs. I just import a block of consolidated files and snap them to the marker in Reaper. Then I can just grab and move them to the places in my template I want them. Takes a few minutes and I don't have to work in someone else's template. I never have issues lining the files up quickly unless someone screwed up the consolidation.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 9, 2024 7:13:56 GMT -6
I just upgraded my work computer from 256GB to 512GB because I couldn't install the 25GB that Visual Studio required..
I bought a nice WD NVME SSD for 50$ on Amazon and had it delivered the next morning. I popped it into my external USB/NVME case and cloned the existing drive in about 10 minutes and then popped the new drive in and got back to work.
Man I love PCs.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 8, 2024 12:13:32 GMT -6
I didn't really like his sound or his work philosophy but damn. RIP.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 8, 2024 12:06:49 GMT -6
Tracking by far. HW does still have one big lead on SW plugins and that's being more forgiving on the audio. I think the plugins are usually too aggressive, at least more so than the hardware they emulate.
But I think it's all relative. I'm not going to compress drums on the way in, but I'll smash them later.
I'll dig into vocals by 10dB+ on the way in and bass might get even more than that and I may or may not do more than that with plugs later.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 8, 2024 7:58:45 GMT -6
I still love crushing vocals with my hardware 1176 on the way in. I don't think it's "magical" or anything like that, but it does the thing and I don't have to worry so much about stuff later.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 8, 2024 6:57:06 GMT -6
I came across some mini PCs the other day and daydreamed about "upgrading" from my lowly i7-9700 to the new i9-13900 which would effectively double my power, but then I remembered that I barely use 50% of my CPU as it is..
The new hotness will always be an enticing thing, but the new adopter tax is a big one.
Anyway, to accurately discuss new Macs in this or any thread, I believe I need to gripe about Apple not including some esoteric feature that 99.999% of people don't want or need and then proclaim that I will wait for the M5 chip, right?
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 8, 2024 6:50:54 GMT -6
Nice. Sounds better. Have you tried the Ruletec EQ1? You can boost top and bottom, then use the "pultec trick" on the low end to get less of the mid-low bloom and tighten it all up. Would end up sounding similar I think.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 7, 2024 9:21:56 GMT -6
Haven't used either but I do have a comment.. I have a SM7A and a handful of ribbons and I can't say I've ever really felt the need to boost any of them. I can't remember a time that I turned any of the preamp gains up to what I felt was an abnormally high level..
What kind of configuration would require something like this?
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 6, 2024 9:11:41 GMT -6
Good riddance. The music instrument equivalent to Walmart drive the proper mom n pop stores out of business. Let them rot. I hope the local shops make a come back. I want to buy from people who give a damn. Was that ever true though? Growing up we had a mom and pop music store in my town and they were the worst. I'd go in there and look around while dreaming and planning, and they'd chase me out with a "if you're not here to buy, get out" kind of thing. The few times I wasn't immediately chased out, I'd ask questions and get a nice "get your parents to sign you up for our classes and we'll answer your questions".. Of course I wasn't there to buy, I was like 15 and had no money. When I turned 18 or so, Mars music opened a store within driving distance. I then learned that the most basic drumset that the local store was selling for 1200$ was actually 500$ at Mars..
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 6, 2024 7:42:55 GMT -6
Nuke the vocals with an 1176 or other fast compressor. Seriously. I went down a rabbit hole years ago about how to do this and just about every Pro I could find doing top-tier vocals is absolutely nuking them at some point. Once I started hitting about 10dB+ GR on vocal tracks, things started getting a lot easier fitting them into the mix. Then you can automate the vocal track or duck other tracks that conflict. I'm doing both these days. I tend to duck BG vocal tracks when they interfere too much.. Also the vocal reverb gets ducked if it's a thick reverb. Sometimes even guitars might get ducked.. If it's something like rap or pop where the vocal absolutely needs to be front and center without being too loud, then make a vocal bus and an everything-else buss and duck the everything-else buss a little.. Yes nuke them with something that will make them sit in the mix so you need it to speed up on peaks to smash them down and then slow down on the body to not pump it up. An 1176 cannot do 10 vu off without pumping up the body because it speeds up. It can do a few vu off and then you need another much slower compressor to Make it sit like a la2a but an la2a doesn’t release fast enough except in spot of gain reduction but if there are no peaks left to make it speed up, there is a ton of bad compression that needs a ton of fader rides to automate your way out of and maybe even expansion. The distortion of the distortion also overmodulates the signal and kills clarity which is sometimes cool but often just makes everything sound worse and the quality of so many popular music records is limited by the extreme vocal compression. Their voices were distorted pre going onto the tape or into the converter. No amount of mixing or mastering can make them realistic again. The production is just poor despite being radio hits. The software 1176 cannot do jack because they cannot smack the peaks down. You can use compressors that can speed up on peaks and slow down on the body now. There are so many that aren’t an 1176, la2a, dbx 160, or 10-30 thousand dollar Fairchild and have better control of the signal. I don't have these troubles with the 1176 hardware OR the plugins. I am doing pretty fast release and around 12:1 ratio usually though.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 6, 2024 6:49:07 GMT -6
Just circling around on this again. So far I think John is coming, myself, and maybe svart . Currently the plan is on Monday evening, the 13th, to go see Guthrie Trapp at the Underdog and hang out. Seeing who else would be interested and keeping thread alive I made a big old mistake and apparently I'm a terrible person.. The lady's birthday is the 13th and I might have mentioned to her about going out of town on that day and now I'm in the doghouse for forgetting.. So it goes without saying I'm not going to make it on the 13th. Anyway, if you guys decided to do it maybe the following friday or the next weekend...
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 6, 2024 6:46:20 GMT -6
Nuke the vocals with an 1176 or other fast compressor. Seriously. I went down a rabbit hole years ago about how to do this and just about every Pro I could find doing top-tier vocals is absolutely nuking them at some point. Once I started hitting about 10dB+ GR on vocal tracks, things started getting a lot easier fitting them into the mix.
Then you can automate the vocal track or duck other tracks that conflict. I'm doing both these days. I tend to duck BG vocal tracks when they interfere too much.. Also the vocal reverb gets ducked if it's a thick reverb. Sometimes even guitars might get ducked..
If it's something like rap or pop where the vocal absolutely needs to be front and center without being too loud, then make a vocal bus and an everything-else buss and duck the everything-else buss a little..
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 3, 2024 6:09:43 GMT -6
Loud is not good for your ears, nor your recording. An amp will be just above talking volume for most recordings. If it's shaking the walls, then something wrong is being overcompensated for. loud=bad is a pretty wild statement when so many classic guitar tones come from cranked marshall/fender/vox amps at much louder than talking volume. many of my amps sound pretty unremarkable at moderate volumes, and really shine at high volumes. sure, some tones don't get better with a lot of volume. but some are simply hard to achieve without it. Nah, it's more of a rock-n-roll description.. "I cranked that amp" is usually boasting by musicians and engineers ala the "turn it to 11" joke. Take a "cranked" marshall JCM/JMP.. It really just needs the master volume turned up to get the output tubes biased well and get the low-end whoomph out of it, but you'd turn down the input gain so it's not so brightly fizzy through a cab of greenbacks. In this case, "cranked" is not really *louder* although the knob might be "cranked".
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 2, 2024 10:30:15 GMT -6
Two. The KH310s for pretty much everything, and usually earbuds for final tweaks these days.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 2, 2024 6:06:41 GMT -6
I love my R121. I have a friend who had a R10 and it never sounded "royer" to me. I have a couple Bumblebee ribbons too. Love them as well but while they look like a royer, they are their own beasts. Much more hi-fi sounding than the royer, but still ribbon-y.
Are the Bumblebees brighter than the Royer, then? Have you found good uses for them?
A little bit brighter. It's hard to quantify. They also don't have the mid-range bump that R121s have. I still like them on guitar cabs, but I'd use them more off the dust cap than an R121 would get used. There's videos on this forum of them being used on various sources. Those were part of the reason I bought them.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 1, 2024 12:30:05 GMT -6
Depending on the day, I might be able to drive up.
|
|
|
Post by svart on May 1, 2024 9:28:56 GMT -6
MK012 here. Would probably use my KM184 but it's on OH.
|
|