Real amps vs modelling and plugin amps

[Naillerz78]

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ToneX aliases, it is audible, no testing required, though considered testing does prove it is aliasing without a doubt. The reason they tested it in the first place is IK claims it is aliasing free but you can hear that it probably isn’t true. Something was audibly wrong and the test shows it is indeed aliasing, but god forbid they should change anything!

Well I guess the proof that it aliases is in the fact IK made the big claim “no aliasing whatsoever” on the website, as you said. shooting themselves in the foot. As that’s not yet possible without mega-cpu power afaik.

Would an easier way to test be the below method after recording a gained guitar track with Tonex (?)
The fizz and whistle ought to appear audibly in the EQ sweep…and the ‘ck’ on the pick attack (?) also perhaps.

[zerocrossing]

Further reports in my "does it alias?" reporting.

I went back to my deleted list of bad actors to see how they might perform in real world situations. For instance, when I tested "Distortion" (Based on BOSS DS-1) it aliased pretty heavily, but I had it on full gain. I found that moving it to 8 (our of 10) made the aliasing disappear. (from here on out, "disappear" and "none" will mean I couldn't hear it)

This gets tricky, because when you add an amp to the mix, any amp, you're pushing the input a bit and adding to the distortion. My test amp was the Mesa Triple Crown (not on the list) and I was able to get all three channels to exibit no aliasing using Distortion, even though Channel 3 (HI) was set at a gain of 7. So the pedal Dist was set at 7, level 5, amp gain 7. Very high gain sound and no aliasing. This was tested with my ATC's triangle oscillator and with my Steinberger GMT-4. For fun, I also ran the HT-5 Dual and the Tube Driver into the Triple Crown HI channel and didn't detect any aliasing up at the top of the high E string.

Metal Distortion 2, based on everyone's favorite HM-2, struggled with aliasing even at 2. I could dial it out completely at 1.3... but honestly, this pedal sounds terrible in the real world and the plugin world.

Power Wah Fuzz was impossible to stop the aliasing, unless you limit your playing to the 20th fret E string. Under that it's good. I didn't Going back to the poorly performing HM-2 emulation, it's the same deal. Even at high gains, you're good under that high C (C5 on a MIDI Keyboard, fret 20 on the E string of a standard tuned guitar) Who plays higher than that, anyway? Jerks, that's who!

On to amps. I'm not going to go through all of them, because I'm noticing a pattern. The aliasing can be avoided at moderate settings. The Boston 100 (lolz) was one of the worst offenders in the DIST channel, but by backing off the input to 0 db, I was able to get to almost inaudible levels. Another bad offender was the Mark IIC+, which has to be a bug. Even on a lead channel gain of 3 I got audible aliasing and not until 2 did it disappear. I guess I could report it, but they'd just ignore me, as they do.

So, to clarify all of this, if you're super worried about aliasing and Amplitube, don't be. It is both real, and easily avoidable. I think that unless you're super metal, ultra high gain oriented, you won't have any issue at all, and even if you are, there were plenty of models, like the Mesa Triple Crown, that had tons of gain and no aliasing throughout the full guitar range.

On to Tonex... I just did a quick survey and I couldn't find any egregious offenders until the UR Brown Sound Vol. 3 preset from the user library.

https://tone.net/tonex/tonemodels/13727

So, not an IK capture, so who can say what's up with that. I don't own the Brown Sound official add on pack, so I have nothing to compare it to, but there you go. I did a survey of a bunch of high gain profiles and I'd say that at C6, many do show some signs of aliasing, even drive models, sometime pretty obvious. At C5, this goes away.

That's all, folks. If ultra high notes on Tonex are going to drive you away, what can I say? When I got away from sending in test tones and just played, I honestly didn't notice anything in any of these tests, other than the Amplitube Mark IIC+, which I'm calling a bug.

[guitarzan]

…If ultra high notes on Tonex are going to drive you away, what can I say? …

Again, every note on a guitar, open or fretted anywhere up the neck, produces a significant amount of high order harmonics, so the aliasing will be there with every note played. If you can ignore it that’s fine with me, but it is still there all the time, and once you hear it, it can’t be ignored.

edit… hey, would a good analog lpf filter set to cut at 11-12k placed before the interface or ToneX pedal be a solution here? Seems like it would have to do a lot of good, right? I have a killer Broughton lpf mini pedal.

[Uncle E]

Turn off Tonex's IR's and run it through AmpliTube cabinets. That will filter out those frequencies.

[guitarzan]

Turn off Tonex's IR's and run it through AmpliTube cabinets. That will filter out those frequencies.

But to prevent aliasing the cut would have to be before the a/d conversion, wouldn’t it? Or at least before the first non-linear stage?

I already use a separate Nembrini IR loader on iOS and I have a low pass on it, but that’s just to smooth the pushed clean setting where I can’t hear any aliasing anyway. It doesn’t work nearly as well with any kind of even moderately light overdrive profile running.

[Uncle E]

Give it a try. Load a Tonex capture as an amp in AmpliTube and use an AmpliTube cabinet. Personally, I use a capture of my own speaker cabinet after the amp capture, that's even better.

[guitarzan]

double post

[guitarzan]

No chance I’m using Amplitube, but maybe a strict cutoff after ToneX would work since only the high order harmonics are aliasing, not the whole spectrum. I guess that should work even digitally as long as the filter itself doesn’t alias.

I don’t know though, I always thought once you have aliasing it’s pretty hard to get rid of it, like the aliasing itself reaches into the lower frequencies that you wouldn’t want to cut even though it originates in the higher frequencies. Maybe in this case because there is some oversampling though…?

This is IK’s job really. They need to figure out where to put an lpf and how much to up the oversampling and do that.

In fact, once I figure it out I think I’ll profile the whole works with NAM since it’s already become a DIY project either way. Yep

[Uncle E]

You can use NAM the same way I use Tonex. Make a capture of a cabinet instead of using an IR. It's great.

[guitarzan]

I’m actually going into a real cab for my main setup — I’ve got a rather elaborate low-power lowish-volume hybrid setup that all began as a workaround for ToneX aliasing.

It’s cool because it combines like three or four generations of equipment gathered for low volume jamming, none of which really worked on their own, but profiling pulls it all together with the authentic vintage output section behavior.

I have something that works for me at home, but IK still needs to fix the aliasing in ToneX — why wouldn’t they? I’d still like to have something that could do it all right on my phone (plus mini interface), or with a mini pedalboard in the case of ToneX One.

[Uncle E]

Have you tried UA amp pedals or Ox Stomp? Those are controlled by an app. Before I captured my speaker, I was recording using the Tonex pedal through the Ox Stomp, and that was great.

For live, I use the Tonex pedal through an old amp and a traditional speaker (not FRFR), probably pretty similar to what you're doing.

[guitarzan]

OX Stomp looks cool, never really heard about it I don’t think.

The Woodrow would be the UA pedal for me if any, but from what I’ve heard online it really doesn’t seem to do what I want. Profiles can actually capture the vintage worn-in loose vibes that algorithms just don’t seem to even try to tackle.

The pushed clean sound I have going on ToneX for iOS (iPhone) is great —top notch — but that’s as far as I have figured out how to push it without aliasing, staying in the box anyway.

It’s very dynamic and it growls nice and sags a bit when I dig in, but it is very light overdrive by modern standards. Vintage clean is probably where it would be categorized by most.

It’s probably actually under-driven from what was intended, but that’s what it took to get rid of the audible aliasing, and it really does sound like a nice old tweed deluxe with the volume on 3 or 4 or so. I have the ToneX EQ running post amp, hours of tweaking to de-bloat and lift… Nembrini IR (with its own EQ, etc, and Nembrini delay, tremolo and reverb also in the rig) all running in Aum on my phone.

Running at 24 bit/48kHz I can have very low latency (don’t remember what I have the samples set at but its low enough where I don’t notice any latency) and the whole works is still well under 50% DSP load, and this is a cheapie iPhone. Wonderous days.

[zerocrossing]

Turn off Tonex's IR's and run it through AmpliTube cabinets. That will filter out those frequencies.

When I was doing my "real world" tests, I left Amplitube's cabinets on, and even tried and IR, and when I got it to alias, it was not filtered out, so I doubt this would make a difference.

I also found a lot of captures of all gain types that either didn't alias or only did a tiny bit when you were up around fret 20 on the E string, so I'd ignore that dude (I did). He's clearly just here to argue. While I am curious as to why some of the captures and models alias during some cases, I feel it's silly to fixate on it any more than we already have. There are so many that don't. You could spend a lifetime getting a wide range of great tones and never have to experience it. That seems like a better use of my time.

Let me know what your IK rep says, though. I'm curious. I've had very poor results submitting bugs. Two weeks ago, I submitted one about the weird high gain sound that's heard under moderate driven sounds in a few amps, and other than the auto-response, no one's contacted me about it. I'm sure when they do, they'll do what they always do, which is to ask how to reproduce it, even though I've already explained how to reproduce it, and then I will explain again and they will never get back to me and the bug will remain. I'm still amazed that they stopped development on the Uno Synth Pro editor after a single bug fix release, when it's missing parameters and non-functional in many DAWs. It doesn't surprise me that so many complaints about their customer service pop up here on KVR. They suck.

[guitarzan]

…I also found a lot of captures of all gain types that either didn't alias or only did a tiny bit when you were up around fret 20 on the E string, so I'd ignore that dude (I did). He's clearly just here to argue…

You’re the one telling me I don’t hear what I do hear (clearly), and that repeatable testing confirms.

The aliasing I’m talking about is on the high harmonics (not the fundamental), it doesn’t do the wobbly frequency thing audibly in actual use because it’s aliasing multiple harmonics all at once (it does wobble when testing with a sweep that includes all the high order harmonic frequencies common to a guitar, as linked earlier), it is more like a fret buzz or bridge rattle except nothing can mitigate it and it is pretty much all over any profile that overdrives and can be heard on all notes. Actually more likely it is happening all over every profile but can be heard most clearly with the overdriven profiles because it is ToneX aliasing, not the profile.

It’s not that obvious or loud, but once you hear it, it is always there and nothing can touch it.

It should be a fairly straight forward fix on future iterations. Or I’ll just move on, profiling works and someone must be building something that has less aliasing and I’ll just switch to that now that I know the tone is worth the money spent. I also want to check out an analog LPF in front of the a/d conversion before I spend more money. Another mini pedal in front of my little mini Apogee would still make a great phone rig. I’ll make a tiny pedalboard/wallet thing if it works.

[electro]

You can use NAM the same way I use Tonex. Make a capture of a cabinet instead of using an IR. It's great.

This sounds very interesting!