What do you think of DMG equilibrium ?

[jtsterays]

Mind you, in real-life situations these differences are so small that not many even hear it. Quite often ppl also mistake transient smearing for softening, which is why some will even prefer the sound of some cheaper eq's.

Mind you, the smearing can be abused in Equilibrium too. You can set it's windowing size and type to force really heavy smearing, which can sometimes be extremely good. I love using Equilibrium when I need to soften clicky hihats or other drums/percussion. Simply by boosting or cutting at the offending frequencies you can smear it so much that the end result is better.

That's the power of EQuilibrium. You the user have all the choices you could ever need for a digital EQ. It can be the "best" EQ in the whole industry with ridiculous settings and it can also emulate "bad" EQs.. and you have full control over the phase response in the FIR 'free' mode, meaning you can actually exaggerate pre-ring, which again can be a nice little trick (works well on kicks and such when you want them to go "wwwwoooOOOP".

Can you recommend me a good setting for this? I personally hate the clickiness of modern musics, always love the smeary high end of low bitrate mp3 but emulation like the Goodhertz doesn't sound like the way I wanted.

You can use two EQuilibrium instances, one with bands boosting in normal phase mode and one set to the exact same bands but inverted (cutting) and set to opposite phase mode (pre-ring mode, by moving the 'phase dot' in the 'free' mode). This will get you a flat frequency response but all the smearing you want.

Just use EQuilibrium in it's FIR 'free' mode and set 'Impulse length' to 1024 (the lowest possible). You can shape the smearing with the frequency where you are cutting and boosting. If you boost/cut higher up you get shorter impulse lengths but if you do it in the lower frequency regions you get much longer ringing filters.

Appreciate that.

[bmanic]

I edited my post to be more clear. I also changed the image to a real world example of how to do it.

[dionenoid]

Can you recommend me a good setting for this? I personally hate the clickiness of modern musics, always love the smeary high end of low bitrate mp3 but emulation like the Goodhertz doesn't sound like the way I wanted.

Accidentally just stumbled upon this one :
https://gearspace.com/board/music-compu ... ncies.html
Includes a preset. I didn't try yet, so might not be good, but anyway...

[jtsterays]

Can you recommend me a good setting for this? I personally hate the clickiness of modern musics, always love the smeary high end of low bitrate mp3 but emulation like the Goodhertz doesn't sound like the way I wanted.

Accidentally just stumbled upon this one :
https://gearspace.com/board/music-compu ... ncies.html
Includes a preset. I didn't try yet, so might not be good, but anyway...

Thanks, I'll take a look.

[plexuss]

EDIT: Actually you don't need two instances.. no idea why I thought you would need two. You can do everything within a single instance of EQuilibrium, of course. Just have an identical cut and boost then simply set their 'phase dots' in opposite directions. This will cancel out the frequency response but you are left with the 'phase wobble' and impulse ringing which will do the smearing.

Just use EQuilibrium in it's FIR 'free' mode and set 'Impulse length' to 1024 (the lowest possible). You can shape the smearing with the frequency where you are cutting and boosting. If you boost/cut higher up you get shorter impulse lengths but if you do it in the lower frequency regions you get much longer ringing filters.



In the image above you can see that I have two bells, both at exactly 2kHz. One is set to +6dB and the other to -6dB. I've then reversed the phase of one of the bands. This causes a flat frequency response while still causing impulse ringing. You can use this to smear things. The steeper the bells are and the lower in the frequency range you set them the longer and more severe the ringing. Note that at an impulse size of only 1024 the ringing will be "cut off" though.. this can cause some discontinuity and weirdness. You can use the padding setting to mitigate this.

Anyhow, it's worth exploring what kind of smearing you want. For closed clicky hihats I always have two or 3 bells narrow bells quite high up in the frequency range. Between 3 and 10kHz. This causes a really clear smearing ripple and can help take off the edge of the hihat.

THis is a brilliant way to use the unique features of EQuilibrium! In many ways this demostrates what I said: that the value of EQuilibrium is more in it's worklow flexibility and feature-set than the sound it imparts. it's not so much a colouration EQ or tone bender. Althought it can do that but with a very smooth extended transparent sound.

bmanic if this is a techqnue you came up with yourself, I am happy to call it The Bmanic Technqiue. A very nice use of audio engineering! If not, where did you hear about this technique if you dont mind sharing.

One thing: I think the filters need to be in series. ?

[bmanic]

Yes, filters need to be in series.

.. and yes, I did come up with this myself using Equilibrium but the idea of smearing clicky annoying transients with EQ is an old one. I've heard old engineers refere to EQs as sounding "fast" or "slow/mellow" and what they are talking about is how the transients sound after processing.. so I just tried to figure out a way how to abuse this within Equilibrium, though to be fair, in the analog domain you don't get pre-ring to help out.. instead you have various sorts of slew-rate and tube sag on the transients.

I also used to covert clicky hihat tracks to MP3 and back to .wav just to get that transient smear. Unfortunately that also always brought that watery wobblyness into the audio.

[solvni_music]

you mix mp3 and convert it to wav ?!

[pekbro]

I like Equilibrium of course, I'm just too cheap to buy it.

[bmanic]

you mix mp3 and convert it to wav ?!

No. I used to bounce down a clicky/annoying transient heavy track to low/medium quality MP3, then convert it back to .wav and import it back into the mix.

It was a way to force smearing artifacts on things.

[jtsterays]

you mix mp3 and convert it to wav ?!

No. I used to bounce down a clicky/annoying transient heavy track to low/medium quality MP3, then convert it back to .wav and import it back into the mix.

It was a way to force smearing artifacts on things.

What's the point of the second step? Just leave it as mp3 in the mix no?

[plexuss]

you mix mp3 and convert it to wav ?!

No. I used to bounce down a clicky/annoying transient heavy track to low/medium quality MP3, then convert it back to .wav and import it back into the mix.

It was a way to force smearing artifacts on things.

Reminds me of the 1990s when I'd record direct from hardware synths and drum machines to DAT. I'd transfer the DAT to 15 ips tape and back to DAT to smooth and warm things up. eg. make it sound worse techincally but better sunjectively.

[justin3am]

Equilibrium is definitely one of the EQs I use most. As others have noted, it's well suited for bread and butter EQing, creative processing and detailed surgical filtering. I've been a big fan of Dave's plug-ins for a long time.

[bmanic]

you mix mp3 and convert it to wav ?!

No. I used to bounce down a clicky/annoying transient heavy track to low/medium quality MP3, then convert it back to .wav and import it back into the mix.

It was a way to force smearing artifacts on things.

What's the point of the second step? Just leave it as mp3 in the mix no?

This was such a long time ago. I don't remember why but I think maybe the DAW I was using back then didn't have the ability to run mp3 files mixed with other files. Or it was just out of convenience to have all audio in the same format.

I do remember the mp3 processing being completely offline and via a console/DOS prompt. Could be I was using Samplitude 2 or 3 back then.. or Logic Audio on Windows. It was really a long time ago.

[jtsterays]

you mix mp3 and convert it to wav ?!

No. I used to bounce down a clicky/annoying transient heavy track to low/medium quality MP3, then convert it back to .wav and import it back into the mix.

It was a way to force smearing artifacts on things.

What's the point of the second step? Just leave it as mp3 in the mix no?

This was such a long time ago. I don't remember why but I think maybe the DAW I was using back then didn't have the ability to run mp3 files mixed with other files. Or it was just out of convenience to have all audio in the same format.

I do remember the mp3 processing being completely offline and via a console/DOS prompt. Could be I was using Samplitude 2 or 3 back then.. or Logic Audio on Windows. It was really a long time ago.

I see, I wasn't making music at that time so I don't know the technical struggle. But anyway, back to the transient smearing stuff. Appreciate the technique you shared (and the guy who linked the GS link), but it seems like it's still not what I'm after. So I did some more digging and I found exactly the one I need, which is the Ozone's codec preview feature. Using lower bitrate I got the extreme transient smearing which I was after. The 2 formats (MP3, AAC) sound quite different too, especially if you use the delta (solo artifact) which result in some pretty cool "noise drumloop" sounds.

[bmanic]

So I did some more digging and I found exactly the one I need, which is the Ozone's codec preview feature. Using lower bitrate I got the extreme transient smearing which I was after. The 2 formats (MP3, AAC) sound quite different too, especially if you use the delta (solo artifact) which result in some pretty cool "noise drumloop" sounds.

You could probably also explore some FFT based effects, for instance Unfiltered Audio BYOME has some interesting variations available.

Another really cool lo-fi smearing effect is Aberrant DSP Digitalis.