The difference is therefore much more apparent in dynamics processors, where the accuracy of attack and release timing curves decidedly influences the sonic character of the compression, limiting, expansion or gating. This is especially significant in all time-dependant processing. A lot of good sounding digital dynamics processors have the oversampling capability built in to provide a more accurate, natural gain reduction response.īut even oversampling will only get you so far towards perfect accuracy if compared to a well designed analog circuit. This process has to include some carefully designed filtering in plugins to avoid producing frequency content that wasn't there in the original audio and consequently inducing some weird behavior and sound artefacts.
*The correct terms for this process when done digitally/ITB would be upsampling, processing and downsampling, but because the effect of increased bandwidth is the same as it would be if the signal was oversampled originally when converted to digital, most of the plugin manufacturers use that term to describe the process. Oversampling* is in principle a process of guessing what the missing audio samples in between the actually recorded ones would have been if the audio was recorded at a higher sample rate.
BEST FREE PLUGINS TO MAKE YOUR MIX SOUND ANALOGUE UPDATE
Instead, analog gear can go after the exact same effect with vastly superior accuracy and it does it perfectly - especially the imperfections! No tricks like oversampling needed, no CPU hogging, and it still works after you update your OS or plugins. That phenomena can cause reduced headroom, weird distortion and intermodulation and none of those sound exactly pleasant.īut on the other hand, if the circuit is designed properly, the "built-in" true peak processing is nothing to scoff at and can save you quite a few dB of headroom when going into the AD converter! NonlinearitiesĪnalog gear also doesn't have to somehow stitch together different mathematical curves to simulate saturation, distortion and other nonlinearities - things digital sound processing has the hardest time getting right. To be honest, this does not come in handy on every occasion - a circuit with a greater bandwidth can, if not designed really carefully, be more prone to oscillations at frequencies far above our hearing range. If compared to basic digital processing algorithms, this allows the analog circuits to react to "inter-sample peaks" and produce control signals from frequency content that greatly exceeds the human hearing range or Nyquist frequency limit of a digital system. It's important because during the processing itself, especially when any kind of fast timing constants are involved in dynamics processing (I'm looking at you 1176.), the side-products of synthesizing the control signals or even the control signal itself can have a much greater bandwidth than 20Hz-20kHz. But it so happens that analog circuits aren't always limited to 22kHz or 48kHz (as is working digitally at 44.1kHz or 96kHz sample rate), and even if the combined in-to-out bandwidth is only 20kHz, the individual branches of that same circuit can have bandwidths in the range of megahertz or even higher!īut why would this be important? We only hear up to 20kHz if we're very lucky and still pretty young.? Accuracy Temporal resolutionĪll systems have limits. But please, don't freak out just yet - I promise I will try my very best to provide explanations that even my mom would understand, at least in principle. Because the devil is in the details and these details unfortunately happen to dwell in the most murky corners of digital signal processing math and electric circuit modeling, some paragraphs can get seriously nerdy. And that's also the reason was created! We believe that if not absolutely necessary, you shouldn't be forced to make compromises while creating a piece of art!Īnd, a foreword before you dive in. 1 hit "in the box", lots of them have been and will be made that way and that's great! But if you're after the best, deepest, most open and most pleasant sound possible, analog is still the way to go. Note, I'm not saying that you can't make a No.
The funny thing is, it's not some voodoo magic or gut feelings, it's facts and science that slant the tables in favor of analog. Well not all of them all the time, but in quite a few cases analog still reigns supreme over plugins.
0 kommentar(er)
