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[Scott Helmke]

However, people of this segment of the market was willing to embrace the Digital technology and rapidly adopted this concepts (and flaws) as the new standard to the point of spreading thousand of M7 around the world.

I don't really buy that "it was cheap so we put up with the bad sound" claim.  Here in the USA a lot of big churches went for the M7CL... at the same time that a lot of them were also putting in Meyer speaker systems.  One huge local church (with something like six satellite churches and some very good sound engineers on staff) traded in a couple PM5Ds for M7CLs.  I've never heard them complain about sound quality, and they could have put in pretty much any console they wanted.

[Roger Talkov]

All:
I just ran into this thread and it perked my curiosity. After doing a ton of testing regarding digital and analog audio in a previous life I came to several conclusions one of which is "what sounds better"? At the end of the day thats not helpful. Lets try replacing what sounds the same and what sounds different. If it sounds the same, there's a good chance you're headed in the right direction. If it sounds different, you need to take a good hard look at what you're doing unless its intentional. This goes for testing a to d's, d to a's etc etc. One other thing- lets try and debunk the floating point vs fixed point situation. These days, done right, they both do math quite well. A colleague of mine many years ago wrote a paper about the topic many that for the most part remains true to the concept and helps explain the issue. I wanted to share it with you because its interesting. http://www.jamminpower.com/PDF/48-bit%20Audio.pdf

My point in all of this is Same or Different? Then we can get onto the argument of what sounds "better" "to me".

Regards to the list,
Roger
 

[John Roberts {JR}]

I didn't realize there was a floating point vs fixed point situation here. 

I only mentioned floating point in passing to help explain the effect of shifting a digital word left or right, as a fixed finite data resolution scaled up/down by another finite amount.

The same thing goes on with analog technology where marketers and consumers latch onto some obscure theoretical minutiae.

I find it a little remarkable that we discuss how different premium consoles sound when just about every other link in the chain is much more variable.

JR

PS You make a good point about sounding the same vs. sounding different. Exotic high end products kind of need to sound different to justify their existence. I am suspicious of loading termination in some esoteric mic preamps... Promoting the operation of a mic preamp into soft limiting is sure to sound different then even a perfect preamp unclipped. 

[Peter Morris]

Yes but, analog deteriorates much more significantly than digital, one of the inherent strengths of digital. And i remember doing my freshman engineering homework, programming simple math tables in Fortran IV on Hollerith cards, to run in batches overnight on a huge

Ha ….. same here, my freshman engineering Fortran IV programme was to solve polynomial equations and I ran it on a very large ICL mainframe.

I am not foolish enough to make a broad sweeping generalization that "all digital" is wonderful. I have already expressed reservations with how some sample rate conversions are coded.  I have seen issues with early limited word length/data width platforms.  Since I have never seen an objective measurement revealing a smoking gun difference between two professional digital audio paths, what is left is transient phenomenon, like overloading (clipping) the front end. One console maker (Midas) promotes their soft clip limiting mic preamps, and some users consider that part of their sound. (arghhh). I am not a advocate of overdriving any audio path, especially a digital one.

I have a Midas, and I have tried the soft clip on the mic preamps trick -  I don’t like it, but what’s interesting is that the way they have setup the gain structure. As I understand, the mic preamps clip (overload softly )  before you overload the digital path, that combined with floating point mathematics makes the Midas very forgiving for those people that mix and don’t understand gain structure.

Do you think these platforms have not been measured on real test benches? We are well into the 21st century.
I will register that as one vote against the M7.

Absolutely, and I’m sure the designers know the answer, but the tests people are doing on this board I don’t tell us enough.  FWIW the new Yamaha CL range to my ear it sounds fine, someone has fixed whatever it is that I don’t like about the M7 … register 1 +ve vote for it.

[Mac Kerr]

I have a Midas, and I have tried the soft clip on the mic preamps trick -  I don’t like it, but what’s interesting is that the way they have setup the gain structure. As I understand, the mic preamps clip (overload softly )  before you overload the digital path, that combined with floating point mathematics makes the Midas very forgiving for those people that mix and don’t understand gain structure.

I think you find it is common practice to have the analog electronics clip before the digital ones do to avoid digital clipping. It has been a long time since I have heard hard digital clipping on any console.

I too learned Fortran 4 on a cold room IBM 360. Our real calculations were done on a Post Versalog, or K&E Decilon slipstick however. A good way to learn about significant digits.

Mac

[Peter Morris]

I think you find it is common practice to have the analog electronics clip before the digital ones do to avoid digital clipping. It has been a long time since I have heard hard digital clipping on any console.

I Mac

For me its not long at all, New Year Eve; from behind the mix position you could hear and see the hard clip on an M7 ...

[Tim McCulloch]

For me its not long at all, New Year Eve; from behind the mix position you could hear and see the hard clip on an M7 ...

Consoles don't kill music, people kill music.

[Bob Leonard]

Must have been working in some kind of clip joint.

[Jim Baron]

I haven't worked on the PM5D's or any Yamaha boards in that range, but everything I've used from their MG analog series to LS9's and M7CL's all have a noticeable tinge of mud in their preamps. And I consistently see engineers use them and fuss with the parametric eq on the speaker system for correction, when I hear it in the boards. 
 Gotta strongly disagree with some posts regarding the lack of love for Presonus, a company founded on preamp design.  Their preamps have so much more usable headroom than anything else in their class, very similar to the Midas XL3's I was accustomed to in the Venice series--a very different sound, more neutral than the Midas, but lots of range.
 Yamaha has other problems with the intent of their designs, and you can see how they're classified as "commercial products".  Nowhere in their own literature are their digital boards described as music or pro audio products.

[kristianjohnsen]

 Yamaha has other problems with the intent of their designs, and you can see how they're classified as "commercial products".  Nowhere in their own literature are their digital boards described as music or pro audio products.

It's "commercial" as in "people using the products for commerce, in other words, for a living, aka professionals".

[ProSoundWeb Community]