Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Tim McCulloch]

And one very important last one, the badge or brand on the unit. Many a sound person has improved their subjective experience by covering up the Peavey badge. Uli is doing yoemans work to polish his brand image, as if reborn anew and the past never happened. Yamaha has long existed in the paradoxical no-mans land of servicing both the professional high end and value (low) ends of the market (pursuing all the money). Few mange to be successful in just one or the other so their success in both is notable.


JR

BINGO!  We have a winner!

[Danny J. Avila]

Somehow I felt tempted to publish parts of the Preamp schematic section of the PM5D, M7CL and LS9 for comparative purposes but suddenly, second thoughts of warnings and lawsuits made me realize that it won't demonstrate any conclusive difference when a subjective side of users is largerly involved in the phrase "love for the sound of..."

This topic is like discusing about Theology when subtle differences in the perception sense of each individuals can't be measured in the real world. I remember a large post of Mr Jim Gamble, back in 2007 and related to the Digital Mixers limitation and some of his statements about 24bit A/D conversion process and headroom performance.

In terms of sound quality there could be minimal (but measurable) differences by driving/handling analog audio by employing digital level and routing architecture & controls to keep the audio material in the analog domain as much as possible against digitalizing audio from input to output, but this is unviable on financial terms if there's an implied intention of using the price as sales feature.

In today's practical world nobody's willing to invest USD 20,000$ on a Premium grade ALPS fader Mark VIII rugged style audio mixing desk with the Peavey-Mackie-Behringer badge in any visible corner...

[John Roberts {JR}]

Somehow I felt tempted to publish parts of the Preamp schematic section of the PM5D, M7CL and LS9 for comparative purposes but suddenly, second thoughts of warnings and lawsuits made me realize that it won't demonstrate any conclusive difference when a subjective side of users is largerly involved in the phrase "love for the sound of..."

This topic is like discusing about Theology when subtle differences in the perception sense of each individuals can't be measured in the real world. I remember a large post of Mr Jim Gamble, back in 2007 and related to the Digital Mixers limitation and some of his statements about 24bit A/D conversion process and headroom performance.

In terms of sound quality there could be minimal (but measurable) differences by driving/handling analog audio by employing digital level and routing architecture & controls to keep the audio material in the analog domain as much as possible against digitalizing audio from input to output, but this is unviable on financial terms if there's an implied intention of using the price as sales feature.

In today's practical world nobody's willing to invest USD 20,000$ on a Premium grade ALPS fader Mark VIII rugged style audio mixing desk with the Peavey-Mackie-Behringer badge in any visible corner...

Not to pick an argument with Jim Gamble for 3rd person here-say but keeping signal in the analog domain as long as possible is about upside down for insuring signal integrity. Digital is far kinder than analog for all kinds of processing related signal deteriorations. If it is going to end up in the digital domain at all, the sooner** it gets there the better.   

As an old analog dog with some analog console designs i'd still love to sell you, I can't in good conscious claim that analog is better than digital when both are executed to the same high standards.

 JR

***Mic preamps are pretty much analog gain stages and unavoidable the way we currently parse systems. I expect at some future date for microphone outputs to be digital feeding into some network as a common resource to be grabbed by some other process on that same network, but not for a while.

[Justice C. Bigler]

I expect at some future date for microphone outputs to be digital feeding into some network as a common resource to be grabbed by some other process on that same network, but not for a while.

That's right before our digital audio networks become self aware and start calling themselves Skynet, right?

[Danny J. Avila]

That's right before our digital audio networks become self aware and start calling themselves Skynet, right?

Cobranet?

 

Here are the portrayed arguments:

http://www.gambleboards.com/Article.htm

http://gambleboards.com/Viewpoint.htm

[g'bye, Dick Rees]

It's here.

[Geoff Doane]

I while back I was playing with a signal generator and a cheap ADC running at 48 kHz and found that if I blasted enough 25 kHz into it I could indeed hear a 1 kHz tone (the expected aliasng product). --Frank

I'm pretty sure the expected aliasing product in that situation is 23 kHz.  1 KHz might be some sort of intermodulation distortion.

I remember seeing the effect with early DAT recorders (Sony PCM-2500).  I was using a test set designed for analog recorders that generated and then measured and plotted a sine wave sweep.  The sweep started at about 40 KHz, and then went down.  As the sweep started, some random (or so I thought at first) noise would show up on the trace, before being erased by the lower frequency sweep.  Doing a manual sweep confirmed that this "noise" was aliasing products.

As an aside, the notion that 48 kHz sampling must sound better than 44.1 was mostly a falacy as well.  Early digital recorders (including Studers that cost well into the 6 figures), had a fixed multipole anti-aliasing filter that was the same regardless of the sampling frequency you selected.  I believe the current state of the art is to over sample the analog signal, and then do the anti-aliasing in DSP before saving the resulting samples to a hard drive, so sampling frequency may actually have some bearing on frequency response (if you think you can actually hear that high anyway).

GTD

[Bob Leonard]

Not to pick an argument with Jim Gamble for 3rd person here-say but keeping signal in the analog domain as long as possible is about upside down for insuring signal integrity. Digital is far kinder than analog for all kinds of processing related signal deteriorations. If it is going to end up in the digital domain at all, the sooner** it gets there the better.   

As an old analog dog with some analog console designs i'd still love to sell you, I can't in good conscious claim that analog is better than digital when both are executed to the same high standards.

 JR

***Mic preamps are pretty much analog gain stages and unavoidable the way we currently parse systems. I expect at some future date for microphone outputs to be digital feeding into some network as a common resource to be grabbed by some other process on that same network, but not for a while.

As usual spot on JR.
So in the end this all boils down to.
1. Not all boards are created equally.
2. Not all components are created equally.
3. Not all designs are created equally.
 
Therefor NAB+NAC+NAD = A sonic difference that in some cases can be heard and iterpreted as being good or bad depending on your taste and skill level.
 
Who would have ever thought that would be the case. 
 

[Frank Koenig]

I'm pretty sure the expected aliasing product in that situation is 23 kHz.  1 KHz might be some sort of intermodulation distortion.

  You are correct. I heard the tone but didn't think it through.   Of course it's f +/- fs, not f +/- fs/2

 -F

[John Roberts {JR}]

Cobranet?

 

Here are the portrayed arguments:

http://www.gambleboards.com/Article.htm

http://gambleboards.com/Viewpoint.htm

I've seen them and I'm not inclined to do a point by point rebuttal. Digital has been around for a very long time and back in the early days it actually was challenged in several ways.

Generally some of his snakes in the digital woodpile are more like protozoa in modern well execute designs.

As I've said before, I really wish he was correct. I have some ideas for analog improvements I never got to fully convert into cash.  Unfortunately they got mooted by digital technology, that isn't perfect, but pretty damn close.

JR

PS: My confederate money isn't gaining value either.

[ProSoundWeb Community]