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Post by Dan on Feb 15, 2024 21:40:21 GMT -6
Digital has a cancer and the cancer is aliasing. You cannot have audible harmonics above nyquist. They get reflected back. Yet many plugins are crap and permit massive aliasing. Most of these dynamics plugins are either totally smoothed out like a 40 something woman with botox and fillers or totally dysfunctional but can sometimes be cool like a barfly after a few drinks. Others are cool but set stock to blow shit up like the Vulf compressor, half the Molot presets, or even the Weiss ds-1 with a minute amount of gain reduction. Bam Bam sound like the Flintstones until you dig deeper to grasp them. Then there are the old digital compressors that can only do slow attack, medium to slow release and still sound nasty.
Let’s not even get into the analog modeling plugins that are a cool distortion algorithm into a hard clipper and the red lights going off or the needle pinned never sounds as cool or nasty as hardware. Just try to use the plugs as a glorified guitar pedal. Try most of the guitar pedal plugs. They’re gross. Most of them are so bad.
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Post by notneeson on Feb 15, 2024 22:05:01 GMT -6
Hey Dan, nice to have you back.
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Post by geoff738 on Feb 15, 2024 22:46:00 GMT -6
Digital has a cancer and the cancer is aliasing. You cannot have audible harmonics above nyquist. They get reflected back. Yet many plugins are crap and permit massive aliasing. Most of these dynamics plugins are either totally smoothed out like a 40 something woman with botox and fillers or totally dysfunctional but can sometimes be cool like a barfly after a few drinks. Others are cool but set stock to blow shit up like the Vulf compressor, half the Molot presets, or even the Weiss ds-1 with a minute amount of gain reduction. Bam Bam sound like the Flintstones until you dig deeper to grasp them. Then there are the old digital compressors that can only do slow attack, medium to slow release and still sound nasty. Let’s not even get into the analog modeling plugins that are a cool distortion algorithm into a hard clipper and the red lights going off or the needle pinned never sounds as cool or nasty as hardware. Just try to use the plugs as a glorified guitar pedal. Try most of the guitar pedal plugs. They’re gross. Most of them are so bad. Ok. I think I grasp this theoretically. And, in a post above there is displays that show this, and there is a sine sweep that suggests you turn down the effect it is so obvious. And, it is! But what am I listening for, if my elderly ears can even hear it, on program material. Crunchy high end? Muddy, smeary lows? I have to assume that many of my plugs have at least some aliasing. I’m assuming moving up to a higher sample rate and using oversampling if available will help avoid the worst of this. Cheers, Geoff |
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Post by Dan on Feb 15, 2024 23:15:26 GMT -6
Digital has a cancer and the cancer is aliasing. You cannot have audible harmonics above nyquist. They get reflected back. Yet many plugins are crap and permit massive aliasing. Most of these dynamics plugins are either totally smoothed out like a 40 something woman with botox and fillers or totally dysfunctional but can sometimes be cool like a barfly after a few drinks. Others are cool but set stock to blow shit up like the Vulf compressor, half the Molot presets, or even the Weiss ds-1 with a minute amount of gain reduction. Bam Bam sound like the Flintstones until you dig deeper to grasp them. Then there are the old digital compressors that can only do slow attack, medium to slow release and still sound nasty. Let’s not even get into the analog modeling plugins that are a cool distortion algorithm into a hard clipper and the red lights going off or the needle pinned never sounds as cool or nasty as hardware. Just try to use the plugs as a glorified guitar pedal. Try most of the guitar pedal plugs. They’re gross. Most of them are so bad. Ok. I think I grasp this theoretically. And, in a post above there is displays that show this, and there is a sine sweep that suggests you turn down the effect it is so obvious. And, it is! But what am I listening for, if my elderly ears can even hear it, on program material. Crunchy high end? Muddy, smeary lows? I have to assume that many of my plugs have at least some aliasing. I’m assuming moving up to a higher sample rate and using oversampling if available will help avoid the worst of this. Cheers, Geoff Most of the better plugs already have some sort of distortion mitigation that's not a simple oversampling of the entire plug. Some of these only produce low order harmonics like the soft clipping in el arousor or the brutal sidechain smoothing in the waves renaissance plugs. Others have multirate algorithms like Weiss, U-he, TDR, Goodhertz, etc. The Weiss and TDR dynamics plugs usually only oversample the audio to 88.2 or 96 kHz and then the control path can be oversampled far more. I think all of this stuff should be out of the hands of the end user who uses the plugs and the default settings and presets should be functional. Goodhertz and U-he plugs have an HQ button for mixing and then non-hq for playing VSTis. Softube, UAD, and some of the more recent Waves plugs do not let you not oversample. TDR lets users run super fast attacks outside of "Insane" quality where they will misfire but on Insane, work like a logical extension of the knob but even on "Precise" close to the defaults, they're smoother than most other plugs. |
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Post by jampa on Feb 16, 2024 4:11:03 GMT -6
But what am I listening for, if my elderly ears can even hear it, on program material. Here's an example - the four minutes of this video as starting below. In this I focus on the cymbals and the top end of the voice. If you didn't know what the test was for, its unlikely anyone would care. But the irony of our situation as mixers is that as the people who are adding plugins to mixes, we are the only people who will know what aliasing could be introduced or not - i.e., we are the only people who could know what could be there and therefore that could possibly care about it
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Post by Dan on Feb 16, 2024 10:16:01 GMT -6
But what am I listening for, if my elderly ears can even hear it, on program material. Here's an example - the four minutes of this video as starting below. In this I focus on the cymbals and the top end of the voice. If you didn't know what the test was for, its unlikely anyone would care. But the irony of our situation as mixers is that as the people who are adding plugins to mixes, we are the only people who will know what aliasing could be introduced or not - i.e., we are the only people who could know what could be there and therefore that could possibly care about it
Very limited video. It cannot capture frequencies above nyquist at all. Watch classic Monty video. Xiph developed ogg and flac Dan Lavry white papers. Dan makes great equipment and his soft saturation is still being abused to distort many CDs lavryengineering.com/white-papers |
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Post by Dan on Feb 16, 2024 10:45:36 GMT -6
But what am I listening for, if my elderly ears can even hear it, on program material. Here's an example - the four minutes of this video as starting below. In this I focus on the cymbals and the top end of the voice. If you didn't know what the test was for, its unlikely anyone would care. But the irony of our situation as mixers is that as the people who are adding plugins to mixes, we are the only people who will know what aliasing could be introduced or not - i.e., we are the only people who could know what could be there and therefore that could possibly care about it
That video shows some basics and has some good examples but his understanding of digital audio is not the best. His examples are not that clear, that mixed sounds like totally cooked modern rnb trash, and are over lossy youtube compression. The end small snippet shows you the unnatural envelopes to the drums applied by CLA-76 but the entire mix of those cringe lyrics already sounds like its been marinated in a sea of distortion anyway. The IMD might be so high that any audible aliasing (a form of IMD) doesn't matter because it will be buried in the overly distorted and overly modulated mix and you can only hear the dysfunctional sounding envelopes on the drums and weird cymbals. It's like when you hear someone say they cannot hear the CLA-76 in a mix but their two bus has a multiband limiter being hit so hot that the harmonic structure of the music is so out of whack that it sounds like a bad FM station with an Orban Optimod with roaches inside it. Even the good multiband dynamics processors like DynOne or the Thimeo Stereo Tool will do that with anything over a meaningless db or two of gr. |
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