Hacker News Reader

Comment by riprowan | Hacker News Reader

> The workflow makes the sound. The lack of automation forces you to make choices. Forces your hand, literally.

You raise an excellent point here. A full-blown DAW is practically without limits: hundreds of tracks, unlimited effects on every track, any signal chain is possible.

But making art is about working within constraints. Most of the best art derives from the constraints as much - or more - as the capabilities of the devices or instruments used.

However there is a technical reason why these devices do sound different, and that is that they all impart euphonic distortion. Bass sounds "bigger." Treble sounds "clearer." Mixed tracks "glue together." Vocals "pop out." A sense of "depth of field" may be imparted. Technically speaking this is all "distortion" of the original signal.

View on HN

> However there is a technical reason why these devices do sound different, and that is that they all impart euphonic distortion. Bass sounds "bigger." Treble sounds "clearer." Mixed tracks "glue together." Vocals "pop out." A sense of "depth of field" may be imparted.

Digital advocates are quick to point out that all of those phenomena can be perfectly modelled in the box. We have convolution reverbs and tube amp models and emulation that can be scientifically proven to match the analog gear.

By point is, you _can_ do all that, but will you? You have a world of possibilities, and so the likelihood when working with a digital / software workflow is that you'll stick to the relative strengths of that setup.

Another thing to note about the hardware console interface is the nature of a classic design. Consoles like the Neve or SSL are familiar to engineers, they are instruments with a hand feel. A recording or mixing engineer can go into a studio and get similar results from similar gear. The listeners ear can pick up a je ne cest pas familiarity from it, what you call "good sound" in another comment, without quote knowing what they're hearing. The same way the Telecaster just "sounds good". It's not better, it's just familiar. Digital workstations are all different and don't achieve the same familiar sound.

> all of those phenomena can be perfectly modelled in the box

Nope.

How you gonna model the interaction between a microphone and the preamp load it's driving, and the compressor that's driving, and the EQ it's driving, and the nonlinear summing bus that's feeding, when all of these are interacting in a live signal chain, and all entering various forms of nonlinear behavior based on the age of components, their tolerances which vary from box to box, heat, etc? It might be theoretically possible, but past a certain point, to model these devices requires modeling physics at the materials level. In point of fact most digital "simulations" of these sorts of devices are not simulations at all, but approximations that impart similar EQ, dynamics, and harmonic distortion.

I'm a dev by trade, been doing audio for decades too. I used to believe this was all modellable too. I think there's a tendency for people who are strong in digital signal processing but naive to what these devices are really doing to the signal to be overconfident in our ability to simulate them in realtime.

You can definitely achieve a reasonable facsimile! But if you want the sound of this console then you're going to have to make one or buy one.

This is all true, but there's a point beyond which it stops being musically/artistically relevant.

I've probably been doing this stuff as long as you have, and I'm not actually sure where that point is any more.

I actually hate the sound of most of the Beatles albums. I think they sound crap by modern standards - tinny, rattly, clogged-up, mid-heavy mixes with no deep bass.

Put them up against a modern trance single mixed ITB and the latter sounds huge, dynamic, cinematic, and infinitely more polished.

Which is better? It depends...

The Pink Floyd albums hit a sweet spot by being musically ground breaking while also being the first examples of hifi multitrack recording in its modern form.

Now I tend to think ITB is fine for electronica and dance, because sometimes you want polish and a slightly unreal shine. But for rock, country and maybe even hiphop the older hardware is going to give you more character, bite, and depth.

Ultimately they're just colours you can use. If you have talent, it doesn't matter if you mix ITB or not.

If you don't, it doesn't matter either.

> I actually hate the sound of most of the Beatles albums.

I agree, and I found the 2009 re-releases to be incredibly disappointing given that they didn't even do the most basic repair work on the most obvious glitches and errors. They were marketed as some major improvement, but in reality were a new remastering only. Removing half of a dog turd from my cup of coffee doesn't improve the coffee.

What did you think of the 2015 stereo mixes? (Only on the 2015 re-re-release of "1", unfortunately. If they released a complete box set of new mixes redone in the same fashion, I'd be first in line. And I'm not even a big Beatles fan.)

> I actually hate the sound of most of the Beatles albums. I think they sound crap by modern standards - tinny, rattly, clogged-up, mid-heavy mixes with no deep bass.

Of course the whole point of bands like the Beatles was that they stood "engineering" on its head, as it was understood at the time (actual scientists wearing actual lab coats attempting to capture sound as accurately as possible).

EMI engineers making classical records were trying to create photographic style recordings. The early Beatles records sound, mostly, like you're standing at the Cavern club in front of a late-1950s sound reinforcement system. Photographic.

The Beatles helped to change the idea of making "photographic" records into making records like painting on canvas. Together with the other influential artists of the time (Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, etc) they transformed modern music.

When yo

>Put them up against a modern trance single mixed ITB and the latter sounds huge, dynamic, cinematic, and infinitely more polished.

>Which is better? It depends...

I think you make my point here.

If I were making a Crystal Method record, of course I would use a different signal chain that if I were making a Dawes record.

That's the whole point.

    Technically speaking this is all "distortion" of the original signal.

Not really - if it was "distortion" you could MEASURE it with an oscilloscope. There's another, less polite, word for most of those comparisons.

If you want to measure it, an oscilloscope is the wrong tool.

You can see it - very clearly - using a lab-quality audio signal analyser from a company like Audio Precision.

https://www.ap.com/

And a popular way to model it is with a DSP technique called a Volterra series.

You may want to consider that impolite words are also used about people who consider themselves very knowledgeable about domains where they show no evidence of understanding the fundamentals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com