Oran Burns wrote on Wed, 31 December 2008 10:42 |
How does it compare to the M7CL? |
Oran Burns wrote on Thu, 01 January 2009 17:45 |
Hey Ivan, In the example that i listed above i swapped the soundcraft console for the M7, so the only thing that changed here was the board so i dont believe that there were other factors at play. |
Quote: |
Without a doubt the best live sound operator I have ever met. His "sound" was in his ears/fingers- NOT the gear he used. |
Quote: |
do you really think you should expect the same performance for a fraction of the price? |
Quote: |
fraction of the price? |
Quote: |
I will quite literally mix on a Behringer if it means I can get a good PA. The choice of PA and all the A/V/L infrastructure is what should be concerning you now, not the choice of mixers. A mixer should be an easy decision that can be made at any time based on need and budget. Any mixer from a reputable manufacturer will "sound" just fine and they should all work and perform equally well. |
Quote: | ||
Im not so sure? I mean the console is the engineers work palette! its how one shapes their sound. I realize that the PA is very important but i think the console is very important as well. Its got to be something that you like the sound of! I use the M7 alot at different events etc and i can get a "result". I just wouldn't put it in my church where sound quality is most important. Going back to the original point? How is the SD 8 sounding? Anyone? Regards, Oran |
Oran Burns wrote on Fri, 02 January 2009 07:57 |
Im not so sure? I mean the console is the engineers work palette! its how one shapes their sound. I realize that the PA is very important but i think the console is very important as well. Its got to be something that you like the sound of! I use the M7 alot at different events etc and i can get a "result". I just wouldn't put it in my church where sound quality is most important. |
Jeff Ekstrand wrote on Fri, 02 January 2009 09:24 |
Great console, by the looks of it. Although I wasn't sure it was CRAZY good enough to justify the price increase. |
David Sumrall wrote on Fri, 02 January 2009 08:48 |
I have heard that the SD8 has a lot of stuff in it functionality wise for the price. But for the rooms I need digital consoles for it is either to big and over budget, or way too small. So knowing that, I don't waste my time worrying about it that much. |
Oran Burns wrote on Thu, 01 January 2009 22:45 |
Hey Ivan, In the example that i listed above i swapped the soundcraft console for the M7, so the only thing that changed here was the board |
Oran Burns wrote on Fri, 02 January 2009 07:57 | ||
Im not so sure? I mean the console is the engineers work palette! its how one shapes their sound. I realize that the PA is very important but i think the console is very important as well. Its got to be something that you like the sound of! I use the M7 alot at different events etc and i can get a "result". I just wouldn't put it in my church where sound quality is most important. Going back to the original point? How is the SD 8 sounding? Anyone? Regards, Oran |
Karl P(eterson) wrote on Fri, 02 January 2009 11:05 |
[*I am going to leave out the obvious week link of the painter..... If we are all being brutally honest the weakest link in any system will always be us, the idiot with two ears (aka "the painter"), as rarely will anyone ever be good enough to truly use a system to its capability. Even after 100's (1000's?) of shows I rarely do "great" work. Took me awhile to learn that. |
Quote: |
but do you really think that in real world use the average church member is going to notice the difference? |
Quote: |
But the M7 sounds fine too. |
Quote: |
overall sound quality was too clinical, too harsh and sounded processed and not natural!!! |
Quote: |
Good luck in your pursuit of "perfection". |
Quote: |
n the case of your M7 demo, maybe it is YOU who are wrong. If the people in attendance liked it better, but you thought it was to "digital", does that make your opinion "better" or right? |
Quote: |
then how do you know your opinion is more important than that of the congregation or your Pastor? |
Quote: |
Is anybody going to get saved by having a digital console that does not sound "digital". |
Quote: |
It appears that you are in the minority-at least in your demo with the M7. |
Quote: |
The point of digital or analog being more natural is also a good question to ask. I can guarantee you that the GB8 colors the sound. While it has good preamps, the Soundcraft will, by nature, change the sound of the signal simply by sending the current through any one of its components. The very fact that it has groups as opposed to VCAs means that the signal is now passing through even more components, and the tone is being altered further. At no point, even with EQ bypassed, and being sent straight to the main mix, would you get the exact same signal out as you brought into the console. At the same time, a GB8 is going to sound different than an Allen & Heath GL3800 or another similar console. Each console, analog or digital, will alter the sound, color the tone, in some way. |
Quote: |
How do you know the D show is a better board-sonically anyway? |
Quote: |
You say you are in pursuit of "a good sound", yet an M7 is unacceptable to you, so that tells me that you think an M7 sounds bad. Or I am reading it wrong? |
Oran Burns wrote on Fri, 02 January 2009 18:12 | ||||
Ivan,
Because i have one in my class room where i spend 10 months of the year!!!!
Not bad just digital. Regards, Oran |
Oran Burns wrote on Fri, 02 January 2009 20:03 |
Why should God settle for less than the best? |
Oran Burns wrote on Fri, 02 January 2009 23:12 | ||
Ivan,
Because I have one in my class room where i spend 10 months of the year!!!! |
Quote: | ||
Not bad just digital. |
Oran Burns wrote on Fri, 02 January 2009 15:03 |
Im not there to please the congregation. |
Quote: |
Im not there to please the congregation. |
Quote: |
Interesting - if you say class room, than that makes you a teacher. So, what you're saying to your students and congregation by example is that they should be as inflexible as they can get other people to pay for? |
Quote: |
Then why ask opinions? |
Quote: |
Spoke to a friend of mine today who does FOH for some of the biggest bands in the world and i asked him what he thought about how the M7 sounds? He backed what i have been saying all along. |
Lee Buckalew wrote on Mon, 05 January 2009 17:18 |
The best sounding digital consoles out there (and recording systems by the way) utilize full floating point computation. Fixed point or fixed point with accumulator sound worse and worse the more channels and processing you utilize, taxing the processor. |
Quote: |
Anything you can do in floating-point can be done in fixed point, and the converse. It is just that the floating-point processors can do a lot of the hand work (scaling, etc.) for the programmer. The floating-point processor is just faster and as such one can do more in a given time. |
Quote: |
As for the second point about "more channels and processing you utilize, taxing the processor" -- the people who do the actual coding recognize that they have a "CPU budget," meaning that they know how much processing they can do within a sample period. The processing doesn't "degrade." You can either do what is called for, or you can't. And any reasonable system will not give you the option to do what it can't do. |
Lee Buckalew wrote on Tue, 06 January 2009 21:40 | ||
True but, per "Handbook for Sound Engineers", Glen Ballou, chapter 25 by Steve Dove section 25.19.3 paragraph 2; "Perhaps the minimum for processing audio dat is a 24 bit word width and correspondingly wider accumulators and registers. As such the Freescale devices just about fit the bill. They are fixed point processors, which directly limits their dynamic range to the number of bits (144 dB for 24 bits, 336 dB for the accumulators); fortunately, this is plenty for most real-world audio processing. Some applications, like some filters, demand wider immediate dynamic ranges in their calculation and intermediate-value data storage, and for those instances long or double-precision arithmetic is used. The down side is that such filters can take up to twice as long (twice as many cycles) to calculate as single precision. 25.19.4 Floating point processors (floaters) as exemplified by Analogue Device's "Sharc" series avoid this problem by representing numbers internally in exponent/mantissa format, having far more involved internal processing to handle the complexity of dealing with these numbers...Since the dynamic range of a floater is as good as infinite regardless, none of the dancing around one sometimes has to do with a fixed point applies." |
Quote: | ||
As noted from the text quoted above there are some processes (complex filters for instance) which tax fixed processing more than floating point processing. I should not have oversimplified it by just saying additional channels. As the fixed point engines are forced to run long or double-precision arithmetic, In my experience, the sonic quality degrades. Perhaps the differences have to do with other design features but, in my experience, quality floating point audio processors sound superior, sonically to their fixed point relatives. That is not to say that fixed point processing devices sound bad, just not as good as floating point devices in my opinion. |
Andy Peters wrote on Tue, 06 January 2009 22:02 | ||
As the members of my tribe are wont to say: "Oy, gevalt! Where DO people get their fakakta ideas?" |
Quote: |
Anything you can do in floating-point can be done in fixed point, and the converse. It is just that the floating-point processors can do a lot of the hand work (scaling, etc.) for the programmer. The floating-point processor is just faster and as such one can do more in a given time. |
Quote: |
It is also worth noting that both fixed- and floating-point processors have accumulators. The accumulator is, like, you know, the most basic of all ALU elements. Without an accumulator you do not have a number-crunching machine. |
Quote: |
As for the second point about "more channels and processing you utilize, taxing the processor" -- the people who do the actual coding recognize that they have a "CPU budget," meaning that they know how much processing they can do within a sample period. The processing doesn't "degrade." You can either do what is called for, or you can't. And any reasonable system will not give you the option to do what it can't do. |
Quote: |
Some systems have pre-set "configurations" where you choose to have a certain number of EQ filters and a particular number of outputs or dynamics processors, or what have you. That way, the user can select the best way, for a given application, to utilize the available processing. |
Quote: |
Marketing blurbs, I fear. People seem to be running around casting stones in ignorance. The whole fixed point/floating point digital audio battle has been fought once already in the realm of DAW software. The outcome was that different developers make different choices, but all competent developers end up making stuff that works very well, thank you! |
Quote: |
I understand that under the covers, Yamaha uses 40 bit fixed point data paths, and 56 bit accumulators. That's more than enough to get the24 bit job done accurately and transparently. |
Quote: |
BTW for the record, my DAW software of choice is 32 bit floating point under the covers, but that had nothing to do with my choice. |
Quote: |
People need to consider what the consequences are, of running out of CPU power. When a computer array (and that is what a modern digital console is) runs out of CPU power, the results are pretty catastrophic and non-subtle. There are major drop-outs, clicks and pops in the output signal. |
Quote: |
Also, converters in good modern equipment don't sound dramatically different. Virtually ever converter chip used today implements the same basic technology, delta-sigma. As a rule their outputs are all fixed-point. The good ones all have very low noise and very good frequency response compared to other audio components. Nobody is going to use too-cheap converters in something as complex and expensive as a digital console, because they are a relatively minor expense. With most digital consoles the greater part of the cost goes into the User Interface, and the remaining analog components. |
Lee Buckalew wrote on Wed, 07 January 2009 09:50 |
Delta Sigma converters sound better than ladders but add latency. Most designers today choose additional latency when they "choose" better sound quality because they can't have both. They compromise. We can make up for some latency issues by utilizing a higher sample rate, this not only decreases latency but, given quality equipment, also improves the high frequency response and "opens up" the sound. |
Arnold B. Krueger wrote on Wed, 07 January 2009 05:40 | ||
People need to consider what the consequences are, of running out of CPU power. When a computer array (and that is what a modern digital console is) runs out of CPU power, the results are pretty catastrophic and non-subtle. There are major drop-outs, clicks and pops in the output signal. |
Lee Buckalew wrote on Wed, 07 January 2009 16:20 |
Andy, As I am understanding it, but I am not a digital designer/programmer, one ended Sigma Delta creates, in general, around 1 millisecond of latency. Having Sigma Delta conversion for both input and output adds about 2 milliseconds. This depends upon sample rate so since a typical digital console has about a 2.4 millisecond latency or so at 44.1/48kHz and 1.2 millisecond latency at 88.2/96kHz that sounded about right. His, Lee Buckalew Pro Sound Advice, Inc. |
Lee Buckalew wrote on Wed, 07 January 2009 16:50 | ||
Arnold,
I am not relying on marketing but on my own listening experiences in the recording and live sound world. I also listen to the opinions of other engineers/producers. |
Quote: |
I do a lot of classical recording work, some which was a part of the grammy process this year. One of the great things about audio is the diversity of people, equipment, technique, etc. and that we can agree to disagree and still have sounds that our audiences like. |
Quote: |
In my experience and the experiance of many other recording engineers (certainly not all), floating point systems sound better for some reason. |
Quote: |
I suspect, but can not empirically prove, that it has to do with the additional mathmatical processes and scaling that they must use. |
Lee Buckalew wrote on Fri, 09 January 2009 10:39 |
Which green markers make CD's sound the best and, is light a wave or particle phenomenon |
Quote: |
Light is both a particle and wave, except when you want it to be one of the options and then it is the other just to spite you. |