Hardware crew and getting your tune LOUD!

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laaaa Wrote:This is something that's constantly puzzling me. 30Hz? You'd need some ridiculously expensive monitors and perfect acoustic environment to hear down there, not to mention boosting down there, surely? Do all you guys have monitors which go that low? Cos mine atm only go down to about 65Hz, so I can either roll off at 65 to be safe, or blindly keep stuff in.

I hope to get monitors some time to get me down to about 40Hz and then I'd roll off at that point then, but rolling off that early, is it really that bad? I mean if your tune is going full volume and you've already got a healthy low end can it make that much of a difference?

What I really want to know is, can you guys hear exactly what your doing with those sub frequencies or is it guesswork/spectrum analysis etc?


a set of mackie hr 824's start to cut around 30 somthing hertz.....
i got a set of 624's they cyut around 40 ish so its fesable....im sure theres other moniters that have a low cut off.

i must say most of my sub work is guess work ...i could do with a proper sub box to know exactly whats goin on....
I was under the impression the HR824's cut off around 39Hz? Still though you'd need a professionally treated studio to truly get an accurate representation even if it wasn't the case I would imagine?
i thought they had a lower cut off than that 35 ish i thought but ...hell we cant be right all the time.....yeah it is 39 ...

i heard a set of these round a friend of a freinds house .....yeah he did treat his garage ....but the bass was unreal...well heavy...
sample rates

this is something ive been thinking about a lot lately, and reading about.. some engineers claim there is a big difference between 96khz and 44.1khz, some say 44.1khz sounds better, etc. i really don't know.

i think its less important for sampling and storing than processing. software processing and synthesis does sound better when oversampling is used, and for instance the phase shifts inherent in digital filtering (which is basically a 1 sample delay for a first order filter) get smaller.

many software synths also produce very annoying clicks when the volume of one sample to the next shifts abruptly, and this can be alleviated with higher sample rates. the downside is that processing at 88.2khz takes twice as much processing power than at 44.1khz


subs

mastering grade monitors and club sound systems do go down to 30hz, and 30hz and 40hz do feel different. it doesnt have much to do with music anymore but is more like a different feeling on your body..

you wont hear any difference on hifi speakers or smaller studio monitors, most likely they'll just start distorting as you crank up the volume as the small bass element cant handle the bass. when mastering for anything else except clubs you can pretty much forget about anything sub 50hz.

the subs do eat up a lot of loudness so what macc and fracture suggested doing, highpassing everything else except drums and bass at 80+hz is a good suggestion. i would leave master EQ highpass to the mastering engineer though

i too, would be interested in knowing how pendulum get their tunes so fckin loud on software! i think theyve got a powercore and i know its got some pretty good (multiband) compressors and eq's, maybe its those? their tunes sound very "flat" in a good, full spectrum way

also, if your monitors dont handle bass too well, you can use a spectrum analyzer to see whats going down there... its a tool well worth learning in any case!

which reminds me of a zen joke...

when a man is walking in the woods and says something, and there is no woman there to hear him, is he still wrong?

Grin

peace
all i can say about how i've seen mastering done by professionals is that the compression applied to a mix is very much closer to limiting with the ratio!

...and, stuff like analogue tape is sometimes used, having an effect on the sound
Dozuki Wrote:Actually Low passing a track at 16K wont give you much more headroom. most of the headroom is taken up by the Low end of the spectrum. It really all boils down to voltage. A sub takes a hell of a lot of voltage as well as amperage to get that huge cone in the speaker moving enough to produce sub bass. On the other hand, it takes very little volatage and amperage to make a tweet do its thing, and just a tiny bit too much and you could blow the little sucker. If you think about, the music you are making is directly controlling a sound system. This is why the db scale is used for both voltage AND sound. Basically they are the same thing.

Anyway, point is, the highs take up VERY little headroom. Good needles will go to 20K+ and most fair ones to 18K. Also realize that when a company says their needles cover from 20 - 18K Hz this is typically the F3 point (where the signal is 3db down from the rest of the signal). It doesn't mean that the needle won't play higher frequencies, just that they are 3+ db lower than the rest of the audio spectrum. If you did lowpass your track at 16k you would loose all the 'air' to all the instruments and the track would sound duller, even on vinyl. Most people, depite not hearing above 16k, would also definately say the track sounds different. Same thing happens with bass. You may not hear 20Hz but you can definatly tell a difference with and without it.

Anyway, don't mean to rant.

-D.

I agree with everything youve said there, but at the same time I stand by almost all I said...

But that is my fault for not qualifying my earlier post better.

Firstly, the situation I was talking about is specific.
Specific to making drum and bass records primarily aimed at the dancefloor.

I was incorrect when stating the roll off of most carts is at around 16Khz.
However, remember this is focused on reproduction in clubs. Most clubs still use 500 ALs which roll off at 17Khz, and actually more steeply than by just 3dB. But 3dB is still significant headroom in itself.

Now regarding this 'air' in the high end of the spectrum - I am all too aware of this - For the last six months or so, I've been solely writing, recording and mixing hip hop, where capturing air in the vocal performance has of course been important. For most purposes I run a good vacuum tube condenser mic through an avalon 737 whose eq section actually features a 32Khz position !

My point here of course is that the likelihood is that many of the samples being used may not contain much of that high frequency 'air' from the original recording. If the sample IS rich in frequency content above 16 / 17 Khz then is that content actually part of the original material? Was it added by a piece of noisy equipment in the chain at the time of the original recording? How many generations old is the sample if it was found on the internet for example? How good is the cart you used to sample with? Are your audio cables from the deck high quality, low noise? Have you run the samples through any noise, click, or crackle reduction processing, in hardware or software ?
In these cases - which is common - cutting at 16 / 17 Khz will not be removing any air, actually heard, perceived, or otherwise - but it will give you some extra headroom and clean up your mix. Maybe this effect is very small on a single sample, but over many, we sum the benefits.

Yes, still the benefits will not be as great as cutting sub below a given threshold, for the very reasons you gave, but that point had already been covered and I was attempting to add to the discussion.

And the fact does still remain that as we age, for most of us anyway, our hearing deteriorates, and this mainly happens by loss of our ability to hear the upper end of the frequency spectrum. In these cases we will NOT be able to perceive the difference that you refer to.
Unfortunately, this happens to most people alot younger than you might expect. Fortunately for me, most of my hearing is still intact, bar a very slight dip at around 16.5Khz Smile

Anyway, bottom line is to always remove any frequencies that are genuinly not needed, on a per sample / track basis, and yes - evaluate each sample / track diligently and make the decision about what frequencies you can cut, and what you cannot.

I think this strategy is a good one to address a large part of the problem that is poised in the original question - how to get the tunes loud.

Unfortunately, the preference for loudness in this genre of music causes many mastering engineers (either of their own accord or under direction from the client) to squash the hell out of the tune with agressive brickwall limiting. I find it harder and harder to listen to much d&b for any length of time due to the relentless fatigue cuased by lack of dynamic range.

Id recommend everyone read Bob Katz' Book 'Mastering Audio - The Art and the Science'

Its enlightening....


Merry xmas Smile

Scopezombie
I was definately generalizing when I posted what I did. I agree whith what you are saying in the above post, that eqing on a sample by sample basis could be a good way to get a little headroom, but lowpassing a whole track at 16K, I would shy away from as I think most people would agree with. Thinking about the high frequencies, I have a monitor that goes up to 30K, and I notice a big difference in the way a track sounds played on this monitor verses one that oly goes up to about 22K. Yea, I know that I' m not supposed to hear up in that freq. but it does make a difference.

Quote:I find it harder and harder to listen to much d&b for any length of time due to the relentless fatigue cuased by lack of dynamic range.

I noticed this a few weeks ago listen to some DJ's at a DnB night. What I noticed was that all the tracks they were playing sounded like a 'wall of sound' and mostly all in the midrange. The midrange was taking up all the headroom and there was very little at the high or low end comparitivly speaking. Boosting the midrange can often make the impression of a tume being 'louder' as this is the range that we are most receptive to. I know that this is one little trick that is used in Pop to make the impression of a song being louder, kind of irritating on a big system tho.

Havn't had my hearing test recently, so I don't know where my eardrums dip Wink Probably would depend on when I cleaned the wax out of them last. Hmmm, speaking of hearing test... 'Most adult don't hear above 16K' - probably came from some scientist blowing sines into a set of headphones and having the subject raise their hand if they hear a tone, kinda like when I was in grade school. This is much different than listening to music, just like an amp or speaker is going to respond differently to pure sines vs music. (sorry just thinking out loud).

-D.

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