Sonic Flavours DQ7 EQ

[bmanic]

im the opposite, i dont care much about digital eq quality anymore.

so i've killed all my snobery and gone back to just using sx eq more than anything , then put all my effort into using each tool to the best of my ability.

i guess nowadays i instead of listing for quality i listen for character and wonder what i can do with it.

This is what I meant by saying "The more I learn the less I seem to really care about what tools I use..". I'm also trying to drop the snobbery a notch but I can't help thinking like a cook (I am one by profession). Sure you can cook a nice soup with mediocre spices and ingredients but it can't match what you would be able to do with perfect ones. A bad cook is always a bad cook no matter what tools he uses, however, a good cook with bad tools does worse than a good cook with good tools.

[rant]As a side note: A customer that is used to eating only at McDonalds might not notice the difference between a soup with good quality ingredients and a soup with mediocre quality. I feel pretty much the same with audio. How can we expect the John Doe Teen to apreciate good sound quality when he gets spoonfed pure digital distortion?[/rant]

bduffy: I've kind of lost it lately when it comes to compression. That Elysia Alpha Compressor totally blew it for me. Luckily I've been brought back to earth by the excellent, free, MjCompressor. I heartily recommend it to everybody. It's on my top 5 compressor plugins list now. Too bad it doesn't have it's own GUI yet but I hope that will change.

Here are some tips: Try it without looking at the attack and release numbers. I know an attack of 700ms sounds crazy but TRY it. Some of the best settings I've found have attacks between 400 and 700ms and a much shorter release (around 50 to 200ms). You can also use it as a leveler, that is, you use very fast attack (less than 10ms) and very slow release (over 2 seconds).

Cheers!
bManic

[bduffy]

The Mjcompressor! Huhn. It's usually Chunkware Vanilla Compressor that gets all the attention. I remember liking that one. Funny thing is, I don't pay that much attention to attack/release times, I find compressor theory doesn't always turn out like it's supposed to in practice, so I usually just go with my ears. I hope I get to try out this Alpha compressor sometime - what's the price tag on that mutha?

[bmanic]

Alpha Compressor, 9999,- euros, unfortunately.

Cheers!
bManic

[martian]

martian: gone back to SX EQ! Indeed! You don't hear that too often. How are you finding that? Sometimes I think the SX EQ's are OK, and sometimes I think they're the bane of existence!

its great, i turn this knob and the sound changes and shit!!

although, it defalts to a really small Q, so sounds weird, phasy and nasal like any min phase eq till you open it up. i use Q (the sx filter eq thing) for high/low passing, but even that doesnt go beyond 12db/oct slopes which can be a pain (doubling up softens the cutoff knee too much).

i still use hydratone as well, which contrary to sx eq sounds musical and powerful instantly, since it has such a large Q by defalt. it has this solid punch in the lows on kicks that i really like, but i think i can equal it or get better for my purposes from gliss eq.

edit: i mixed up cubase channel eq and Q when talking about defalting to small Q(bandwidth).

[bduffy]

Alpha Compressor, 9999,- euros, unfortunately.

Cheers!
bManic

Jesus H.!

Put it on the to-do list.

[bduffy]

martian: gone back to SX EQ! Indeed! You don't hear that too often. How are you finding that? Sometimes I think the SX EQ's are OK, and sometimes I think they're the bane of existence!

its great, i turn this knob and the sound changes and shit!!

although, it defalts to a really small Q, so sounds weird, phasy and nasal like any min phase eq till you open it up. i use Q (the sx filter eq thing) for high/low passing, but even that doesnt go beyond 12db/oct slopes which can be a pain (doubling up softens the cutoff knee too much).

i still use hydratone as well, which contrary to sx eq sounds musical and powerful instantly, since it has such a large Q by defalt. it has this solid punch in the lows on kicks that i really like, but i think i can equal it or get better for my purposes from gliss eq.

Yeah, I still use "Q" sometimes. But I think it's time to just shell out for something good like Hyrdatone. Me, I'll take all the colour I can get.

[defjamm]

i still use hydratone as well, which contrary to sx eq sounds musical and powerful instantly, since it has such a large Q by defalt.

i was fooled by that in the beginning...even the broadest q with the waves reneq isn't as broad as some of hydratones models(don't have hydratone installed right now, i think it was the api, but not sure).

the same q-number doesn't tell much, you have to match the loudness, even when the numbers are different on different devices.

[defjamm]

I have tested the high frequency response of a few EQs a while ago, and as far as URS concerns, they have two ways of treating it: the A10 and the N12 peak at a frequency considerably lower than Nyquist, whereas, e.g., BLT and the S series show a true high shelf response.
Here's the N12...


This is the A10:


The BLT:


And the S series:


So the first two do sound a bit softer in the high frequency regime for a reason. But of course, all this is perfectly legitimate; nowhere on the A10 and N12 is it written that their high frequency curve peaks at Nyquist. All that matters is whether it sounds good or not.

try your test with the bell(not the high-shelf) on the s-series and post this picture. same with the fulltec. i did this test back with version 4, maybe they have updated this now. they claimed to model analog eqs and analog eqs don't behave like that, this is a digital flaw and bullshit marketing. funny thing is, the old waves reneq does this right.

[defjamm]

since i have nothing to do today and was bored i did this test with some other eqs, i used christian buddes vst plugin analyzer.
the sonalksis-eq and waves ren-eq don't have the problem with high frequencies, voxengo gliss has it, kjaerhus, the sonic flavors one too(asymmetric bell).

what do waves and sonalksis right, that they don't have the problem without upsampling?
the free posihfopit does it right too(in analog mode).

pictures:

waves ren-eq


sonalksis


kjaerhus golden eq


voxengo gliss


all at 44khz...the first 2 have symmetric bells, the last 2 don't. 10db added at 12khz...the q isn't the same, but that is not important here, it's just to show the asymmetric bells.

[Christian Budde]

The assymetric bells are due to digitalization of the analog filters (nyquist frequency is translated to oo Hz in that case). If the manufacturer take care they correct it with some math inside there plugin (basically (very simplified) making the peak filter a resonant shelving filter). If they take less care, they avoid such a behaviour by oversampling (->new nyquist is shifted to the right). If they do not take care, they get results like the two curves below.
These filters are not "wrong", especially since most of the people even don't hear anything about 16kHz, but they are different (in that behaviour) to the analog counterpart...

Kind regards,

Christian

[defjamm]

thx for the explanation christian!

if somebody is advertising with 'true analog behavior' or emulation and stuff like that, they should deliver close results imho.

[martian]

defjamm, i believe gliss becomes more symmetrical in high quality mode.

and for the record, sx channel eq has an assymetric bell and sx's Q is symmetric in the highs, a reason they sound slightly different.

christian, i still cant get your plug analyser to work with hydratone, i just get seemingly random phase and amp response. i asked a while ago and it seemed to work ok for you?

[Christian Budde]

defjamm, i believe gliss becomes more symmetrical in high quality mode.

high quality = oversampling!

christian, i still cant get your plug analyser to work with hydratone, i just get seemingly random phase and amp response. i asked a while ago and it seemed to work ok for you?

I stopped developing the current version of my analyser. I've done a new version which is basically only for internal purpose only, but if you drop me a mail I send it to you. Anyway it doesn't have a manual and the support is limited (because it is free, and my time is limited).

Christian

P.S.: One of the new features of the Analyser is, that it allows you to "store & substract" a measurement. This allows you to only display the difference between two plugins. The funny thing is, that sometimes two different plugins have a difference which is inaudible, but some people believe, that one of them sound far better than the other. Especially in case of EQs, because the bilinear transformation is more or less copied from the R-B-J cookbook, so they are indeed more or less the same.
One further thing is to look at the limit cycles of a plugin, because they unveil the internal quantisation of the state variables. But even these are (even with with 32bit internal processing) usually nearly inaudible...

[martian]

defjamm, i believe gliss becomes more symmetrical in high quality mode.

high quality = oversampling!

yes, i knew so much, it says so in most the manuals.

I stopped developing the current version of my analyser. I've done a new version which is basically only for internal purpose only, but if you drop me a mail I send it to you. Anyway it doesn't have a manual and the support is limited (because it is free, and my time is limited).

cool thanks!!

[Frippertronix]

i forgot:
personally, if you want great native emulations i would look here:

http://www.algorithmix.com/en/classic_peq_blue.htm

it doesn't have a fancy gui looking like hardware, but technically it's superior to the urs-stuff.

\

In that price range, I'll always go hardware.