ericn
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Post by ericn on Mar 9, 2022 20:06:35 GMT -6
I would love to try some of these "higher end AD/DA's" but I know its not going to bring me in one more red cent (and all the cents are red now... my days of running in the black from my original music are well and truly over) and I just can't justify the expense. cheers Wiz Wait a sec, Peter you we’re making money from music?
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Post by popmann on Mar 9, 2022 20:10:00 GMT -6
I don't think Eric uses Burl. FWIW. I mean I don't pay that close attention--so, maybe he does but--maybe misunderstanding? Maybe I got too wordy? I'm saying take him at his word that he doesn't think converters make that big of a difference. That's not a contradictory opinion from what sits in his rack, is what I'm saying.
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Post by wiz on Mar 9, 2022 20:22:29 GMT -6
I would love to try some of these "higher end AD/DA's" but I know its not going to bring me in one more red cent (and all the cents are red now... my days of running in the black from my original music are well and truly over) and I just can't justify the expense. cheers Wiz Wait a sec, Peter you we’re making money from music? 8) I know, as hard as it is to believe...I actually used to... It was a good source of income and allowed me to buy lots of studio toys...as soon as music became available on non physical product... that's when it started to slide....and streaming... was the final nail....was fun while it lasted. Nowadays, my entire year of streaming payments...might pay for a couple of sets of strings. cheers Wiz
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Post by wiz on Mar 9, 2022 20:23:17 GMT -6
Wait a sec, Peter you we’re making money from music? 8) I know, as hard as it is to believe...I actually used to... It was a good source of income and allowed me to buy lots of studio toys...as soon as music became available on non physical product... that's when it started to slide....and streaming... was the final nail....was fun while it lasted. Nowadays, my entire year of streaming payments...might pay for a couple of sets of strings. cheers Wiz I get paid more for one three hour live gig now than years of streaming income... If a thousand people listen to my album of 10 songs, on streaming I get X... when a thousand people bought my CD.... that was a fair amount of cash back then
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ericn
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Post by ericn on Mar 9, 2022 20:25:20 GMT -6
I don't think Eric uses Burl. FWIW. I mean I don't pay that close attention--so, maybe he does but--maybe misunderstanding? Maybe I got too wordy? I'm saying take him at his word that he doesn't think converters make that big of a difference. That's not a contradictory opinion from what sits in his rack, is what I'm saying. Hey I don’t think conversion matters that much but Radar V Nyquist and Mytek live here, contradiction? Hell no Great deals. I mean I don’t need 8 ch of Neve preamps to make a great record, but damn that Rack of Dan Alexander sure as hell hasn’t hurt🤓
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ericn
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Post by ericn on Mar 9, 2022 20:33:05 GMT -6
8) I know, as hard as it is to believe...I actually used to... It was a good source of income and allowed me to buy lots of studio toys...as soon as music became available on non physical product... that's when it started to slide....and streaming... was the final nail....was fun while it lasted. Nowadays, my entire year of streaming payments...might pay for a couple of sets of strings. cheers Wiz I get paid more for one three hour live gig now than years of streaming income... If a thousand people listen to my album of 10 songs, on streaming I get X... when a thousand people bought my CD.... that was a fair amount of cash back then m The hardest part of this evolution to playing live as a revenue stream is finding the balance, you can only play so many gigs in a certain area before you saturate the market. The magic of getting paid for recording, the customer decided how much was the Goldilocks quanity of a little Knight Music ( idea for next album title?) and you didn’t care. I’m really curious to see how the world of National touring has changed post pandemic and consolidation.
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Post by Johnkenn on Mar 9, 2022 20:57:05 GMT -6
8) I know, as hard as it is to believe...I actually used to... It was a good source of income and allowed me to buy lots of studio toys...as soon as music became available on non physical product... that's when it started to slide....and streaming... was the final nail....was fun while it lasted. Nowadays, my entire year of streaming payments...might pay for a couple of sets of strings. cheers Wiz I get paid more for one three hour live gig now than years of streaming income... If a thousand people listen to my album of 10 songs, on streaming I get X... when a thousand people bought my CD.... that was a fair amount of cash back then Yeah. Streaming has killed professional songwriting by all but the chosen few.
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Post by Martin John Butler on Mar 9, 2022 21:24:17 GMT -6
Unfortunately, I know how Wiz is feeling. I do have some new hope lately, but reaching my first level of gear desires still seems far away. A Chandler Redd, Tube Tech CL 1b or equivalent, Burl or Dangerous A/D-D/A, perhaps new monitors. That would be my first plateau. I've seen "average guys" studios in Nashville on youtube, and they have 20X the gear I want. So I stopped thinking competitively, and just look towards what I want for what I'm doing right now.
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Post by ericn on Mar 9, 2022 21:41:07 GMT -6
I get paid more for one three hour live gig now than years of streaming income... If a thousand people listen to my album of 10 songs, on streaming I get X... when a thousand people bought my CD.... that was a fair amount of cash back then Yeah. Streaming has killed professional songwriting by all but the chosen few. Hey John slightly off topic but I was curious, I see all of these big performer / songwriters selling their catalogs for stupid insane 3 time NFL MVP money, but I don’t see any press on any of the big non- performer song writers selling their catalogs and I know there are a ton of hits that fall in that category, so what’s the word?
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Post by Guitar on Mar 9, 2022 21:43:33 GMT -6
I've messed around with conversion and it's all fool's gold. I ended up with a pretty regular MOTU as my favorite for my "golden beers/ears." It's like someone asking you does this dress make my ass look fat?
So all you clocking freaks can stick it up your tailpipe if you think you're making some sort of progress with it. It doesn't matter.
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Post by Bat Lanyard on Mar 9, 2022 22:40:45 GMT -6
I've messed around with conversion and it's all fool's gold. I ended up with a pretty regular MOTU as my favorite for my "golden beers/ears." It's like someone asking you does this dress make my ass look fat? So all you clocking freaks can stick it up your tailpipe if you think you're making some sort of progress with it. It doesn't matter. Lol, full stop! Spot on with the dress for sure. I do think the Burls are better though. Better is subjective, of course.
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Post by plinker on Mar 10, 2022 0:15:08 GMT -6
Bump!
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Post by recordingengineer on Mar 10, 2022 0:29:10 GMT -6
I remember some years back with Burl touring studios, to demonstrate the difference between Burl and whatever the studio had. It was perfect, as the studio I helped build was looking to buy a new system. We went to Fantasy Studios where they compared Burl and Avid in a test with a jazz band setup live and recorded to both system simultaneously. Everyone had a chance to listen in mix position and blind a/b. My takeaway, without getting into the smallest of subtleties (which I could careless about myself) was the Burl being more rolled-off on top compared to the more open and/or brighter Avid.
We decided Burl wasn’t worth it for the multitrack converters, so we went Avid (big difference in the low end compared to the 192s), with Burl A/D and D/A for stereo mix and monitoring. It’s all clocked to Antelope’s Atomic. Don’t know how that affects things, but I really don’t care.
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Post by crillemannen on Mar 10, 2022 1:52:09 GMT -6
Reading threads like this always make me feel that the only ones obsessing and make heated discussions over Ad/DA is amateurs. I'm not a pro, I might have passed as a semi-pro at one point in time but ad/da is really the last thing I'd ever care about. 10-15y ago sure. Then low/mid end was quite terrible but these days most things are great and mic placement, room whatever makes about a million times more difference then a converter.
Professional mixers are most likely receiving files recorded with a cheap Apollo interface and a Sm7b anyways.
0.002
Ps.. I also listened to a couple of high-end converters test conducted by a high-end mastering friend and a 0.4db boost in the midrange would have made a bigger difference then choosing converter X over Y
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Post by Johnkenn on Mar 10, 2022 7:40:40 GMT -6
Yeah. Streaming has killed professional songwriting by all but the chosen few. Hey John slightly off topic but I was curious, I see all of these big performer / songwriters selling their catalogs for stupid insane 3 time NFL MVP money, but I don’t see any press on any of the big non- performer song writers selling their catalogs and I know there are a ton of hits that fall in that category, so what’s the word? One thing is that you can’t sell it if you don’t have the publishing or the administration rights on the publishing. I don’t know how it was anywhere else when I started, but in Nashville, you couldn’t get a deal with a major publisher without giving up 100% publishing. And if you didn’t have a major pub deal, you most likely weren’t getting a cut. Maybe it was a little different in the 90’s when there were more artists wanting songs than there were to go around…but by the time I got there in the 2000s, 100% pub was the standard deal for a first time songwriter. So - all of my big cuts and singles - I don’t own. I collect the performance royalties, but not the publishing. I eventually got co-pub at Universal, but then of course, I was taking too big of an advance (don’t listen to lawyers) and wasn’t getting cuts. So on to the next deal where you had to start over and “earn” your co-pub. The idea on the big advance was “get it while you can.” Short-sighted. But no publishing company with any leverage was going to give up ownership without it being the last resort in keeping a hot songwriter. All about leverage. I know a few songwriters that got super hot and became part of the chosen. Then part of the deal structures were to go back and get publishing on past hits. Anyway - those guys have all sold their catalogs. They figure out what it has earned in publishing royalties the last few years and then there’s a multiple they agree on. There are also companies that will buy your performance royalties for a multiple too.
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Post by svart on Mar 10, 2022 10:06:49 GMT -6
If someone is really worried about jitter, take a look at your word clock signal on a scope, but ( SVART correct me if I’m wrong here) your really not seeing what’s going on because the actual converter chips are going to regenerate their own clocking. Will a “ better” clock make an improvement? Maybe, probably will sound different but better is subjective here. Most mass market converters are not going to need or benefit from an external clock, unless your converters number in DR Bill land, are running Old Digi 888’s ( even the clock in a MOTU MTP was an improvement or you are syncing to the outboard world ( most of our clocks were really designed to provide house sync in the video world. A BLA MKII is one of the simplest way to improve an old 888 based PT system, but it will do nothing for my RADAR or Mytek. 90% of Clocking issues are cabling and termination issues ( think shortest runs of RG6 and terminators. If any box has self termination check to see if it really is 75 ohms. There's multiple ways of doing this. The old way was to directly route wordclock to the converter chips themselves, which is why WordClock is at samplerate frequencies. This did what it had to do, sync a bunch of converters and gear to some master system. Newer ways have all kinds of blends of "retiming" or "reclocking" or "syncing" or many other fancy names for essentially not using the external WordClock signal as anything more than a vague sync reference. Modern sigma-delta converter chips will NEVER use direct sampling rate clock inputs. They ALWAYS use some very high multiple of the samplerate as the clock source. MOST of these chips use frequencies up to 128x to 512x the desired samplerate and then divide this back down internally to whatever oversampling frequency they work at internally. Oversampling greatly reduces various noise sources, but one of the greatest benefits is the relaxed requirements for the physical anti-aliasing filters. The second greatest reason to divide down your reference signal is that it divides jitter by a large degree. So, the easiest way to get Wordclock multiplied up to 128x-512x is to use a PLL as a multiplier. The Phase Locked-Loop will use the WordClock input as a reference and compare it to a VCO (voltage controlled oscillator) output and increase or decrease small pulses of current through a filter to form a linear voltage that controls the frequency of oscillation. The reference is somewhat like your foot on the gas pedal of a car controlling the speed. Small movements of your foot make the car go much faster than you can walk and moving your foot back and forth keep the car at a steady speed. Why is this important? Because using Word as a direct reference to a PLL would make the inherent jitter in the Word signal the base jitter for the multiplied signal. Depending on the bandwidth of the loop filter, the jitter could pass right through to the VCO and be multiplied and modulated directly to the VCO output frequency! This is another reason that high clock division values are a good thing in modern converters. However, luckily for us there are such things as "jitter cleaners" which use marketing terminology to describe a PLL with an extremely low bandwidth so that the dominant noise is from the VCO itself, not from the reference as would be normal. This essentially gets rid of any jitter introduced by the word clock, but it also decouples the output signal from the WordClock signal in all other ways besides having a rudimentary synchronization. In summary: A word clock signal should not affect the output of a good re-timing system but CANNOT possibly improve the system's jitter either.
A bad re-timing system will allow wordclock jitter to pass through and possibly be worsened by the upconverting PLLs. This is the reason there is absolutely no benefit to using external wordclock sources in an effort to "improve" sampling jitter. It's also why clocking experts have universally stated that the internal clocks are almost universally better than external clocks.
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Post by plinker on Mar 10, 2022 14:11:06 GMT -6
To add a quick reference to Svart's post w/r/t "Newer ways have all kinds of blends of "retiming" or "reclocking" or "syncing" or many other fancy names for essentially not using the external WordClock signal as anything more than a vague sync reference."... They are all basically forms of Phase-Locked Loops (PLL): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop#Clock_recoverySee the sections on clocking and jitter and noise reduction All the newer converters use PLLs to synchronize their internal clocks with the external clock source. As Svart said, they are not using the external clock directly. They are still using their own internal clocks, but the internal clocks are (imperfectly) synchronized to the external clock via the PLL. For awhile there, many of the converter brands were touting their "Super Gold, Space-warping clock lock with atomic timing accuracy..." bullshit. It was just another PLL. Gibson's auto-tuning system (e-tune) Yep, another application of a PLL! It synchronizes (i.e., retunes) the string with the reference frequency note that it stores internally. Speaking of external clocks, anybody remember Big Ben? tapeop.com/reviews/gear/51/big-ben-master-clock/
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Post by notneeson on Mar 10, 2022 14:24:46 GMT -6
I've messed around with conversion and it's all fool's gold. I ended up with a pretty regular MOTU as my favorite for my "golden beers/ears." It's like someone asking you does this dress make my ass look fat? So all you clocking freaks can stick it up your tailpipe if you think you're making some sort of progress with it. It doesn't matter. Lol, full stop! Spot on with the dress for sure. I do think the Burls are better though. Better is subjective, of course. Burls are great. Put a nice transformer balanced line stage in front of a more conventional convertor though, and you get similar results in my experience.
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Post by svart on Mar 10, 2022 15:05:01 GMT -6
To add a quick reference to Svart's post w/r/t "Newer ways have all kinds of blends of "retiming" or "reclocking" or "syncing" or many other fancy names for essentially not using the external WordClock signal as anything more than a vague sync reference."... They are all basically forms of Phase-Locked Loops (PLL): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop#Clock_recoverySee the sections on clocking and jitter and noise reduction All the newer converters use PLLs to synchronize their internal clocks with the external clock source. As Svart said, they are not using the external clock directly. They are still using their own internal clocks, but the internal clocks are (imperfectly) synchronized to the external clock via the PLL. For awhile there, many of the converter brands were touting their "Super Gold, Space-warping clock lock with atomic timing accuracy..." bullshit. It was just another PLL. Gibson's auto-tuning system (e-tune) Yep, another application of a PLL! It synchronizes (i.e., retunes) the string with the reference frequency note that it stores internally. Speaking of external clocks, anybody remember Big Ben? tapeop.com/reviews/gear/51/big-ben-master-clock/if you want a real look under the hood: www.ti.com/lit/ug/snaa103/snaa103.pdf?ts=1646909191230But there will be math.
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Post by plinker on Mar 10, 2022 16:26:51 GMT -6
To add a quick reference to Svart's post w/r/t "Newer ways have all kinds of blends of "retiming" or "reclocking" or "syncing" or many other fancy names for essentially not using the external WordClock signal as anything more than a vague sync reference."... They are all basically forms of Phase-Locked Loops (PLL): en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-locked_loop#Clock_recoverySee the sections on clocking and jitter and noise reduction All the newer converters use PLLs to synchronize their internal clocks with the external clock source. As Svart said, they are not using the external clock directly. They are still using their own internal clocks, but the internal clocks are (imperfectly) synchronized to the external clock via the PLL. For awhile there, many of the converter brands were touting their "Super Gold, Space-warping clock lock with atomic timing accuracy..." bullshit. It was just another PLL. Gibson's auto-tuning system (e-tune) Yep, another application of a PLL! It synchronizes (i.e., retunes) the string with the reference frequency note that it stores internally. Speaking of external clocks, anybody remember Big Ben? tapeop.com/reviews/gear/51/big-ben-master-clock/if you want a real look under the hood: www.ti.com/lit/ug/snaa103/snaa103.pdf?ts=1646909191230But there will be math. Haha! "Clock Conditioner" -- is that anything like a Furman "power conditioner"?? ...just kidding, I know TI knows what they are doing.
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Post by Tbone81 on Mar 10, 2022 16:32:59 GMT -6
Remember when we judged audio gear based on how it sounded?
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Post by Quint on Mar 10, 2022 17:56:39 GMT -6
I don't think Eric uses Burl. FWIW. I mean I don't pay that close attention--so, maybe he does but--maybe misunderstanding? Maybe I got too wordy? I'm saying take him at his word that he doesn't think converters make that big of a difference. That's not a contradictory opinion from what sits in his rack, is what I'm saying. His recent videos show him using an Apollo, if I remember correctly.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 10, 2022 21:29:57 GMT -6
Remember when we judged audio gear based on how it sounded? The amount of money required to measure this stuff very accurately can get a bit eye watering.. Even a decent BERT, DSO, filter selection etc. can set you back a fair chunk so unless you work for a technical audio company I don't really see the point anyway. Look, no converter is perfect but long gone are the days of R-2R's with analog filters which can be affected by so many components and exacerbated by jitter. We use delta sigma's with FIR's / PLL's etc. and as Svart was saying it's not uncommon to measure over a bandwidth of like 20Hz to 13MHz (yes you read it right, 13MHZ.!!) So in short stuff is far better than it used to be, however our ears do work like super powerful FFT analysers. Even at 15(ish) pSec you'd get random tones from phase modulation effects which measure about -125dB, you can detect that so we try to push it further down 20+dB below the A-weighted noise threshold. In short there's "ways around" the common issues you'd encounter with jitter and any decent design should't cause any noticeable issues as such. That doesn't mean all converters sound the same (for various reasons)*, it means the technical performance of them shouldn't be a limiting factor. On these forums we're not talking Sound Blaster cards (even though they're better than most high end converters from the 90's). We're generally talking about the top tier of manufacturers from the likes of RME, Lynx, UA etc. which are all well over a $1K.. Who here uses an ESI for example as their main interface? That would be a far more interesting conversation. * I just looked over the Apollo X16 AS plots, the high third order harmonics are a bit high and there's a bit of bump / dip between 3 - 8Khz but generally it's pretty great. The MOTU 624 for example has an issue with intermodulation distortion, whilst linearity is bang on flat that's a bit odd and an RME tested against it had higher headroom, less noise and less spurious tones. In short the ADC wasn't all that great comparatively, MOTU Ultra-Lite MK5 is generally better but it still has that odd intermod bump. Point? Ohh, there are differences but also reasons for it. In a studio setup there's no need to know the technical reasons why, just question the myth's because it's wallet friendly and then as you said.. Use your ears.
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Post by craigmorris74 on Mar 10, 2022 22:32:13 GMT -6
Sort of relative to the discussion is that I recently took a cheap, rather pedestrian 8 channel ADC board and wired transformers so that all input active input circuitry was skipped (basically only filtering between the transformer and converter chip, similar to the JCF AD8). The results were pretty shocking. When compared to the Ferrofish Pulse 16 that I was using for extra inputs, the difference was dramatic. Transient response of the modified converter was cleaner and playback was much closer to what I heard in the room when tracking. Much more vivid and alive, and easily discernable when doing blind A/B tests. Shockingly, THD was much lower in the transformer balanced converter (upon further testing, this statement isn't correct.)
When I compared my modified converter to a UA 2192 the difference was pretty small, and I didn't prefer one over another. Both sounded fantastic.
I'm surprised more companies haven't used this input structure, based on my limited tests.
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Post by Guitar on Mar 10, 2022 22:34:13 GMT -6
Sort of relative to the discussion is that I recently took a cheap, rather pedestrian 8 channel ADC board and wired transformers so that all input active input circuitry was skipped (basically only filtering between the transformer and converter chip, similar to the JCF AD8). The results were pretty shocking. When compared to the Ferrofish Pulse 16 that I was using for extra inputs, the difference was dramatic. Transient response of the modified converter was cleaner and playback was much closer to what I heard in the room when tracking. Much more vivid and alive, and easily discernable when doing blind A/B tests. Shockingly, THD was much lower in the transformer balanced converter. When I compared my modified converter to a UA 2192 the difference was pretty small, and I didn't prefer one over another. Both sounded fantastic. I'm surprised more companies haven't used this input structure, based on my limited tests. So Cool! Do you have any photos of your work?
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