6 ms·

Music production wise it's as alive as it's ever been.

by _joel 4y ago

grumpyprole 4y ago
Especially as digital signal chains are potentially more lossy: compression, transcoding, resampling. It's very often completely opaque too.
- leduyquang753 4y ago
  No the producers don't just recompress and resample between every track of the mixer, that would be foolish both quality and performance-wise. The source materials are, if even needed, decoded only once and inside the production software it's always raw sample data.
  - grumpyprole 4y ago
    I am speaking generally, it is difficult to be in full control of the signal chain as it is often up to the software and operating systems. Even as someone who just plays music, getting a "bit perfect" feed for my DAC is highly non-trivial.
    - Flankk 4y ago
      A DAC is a sampler that sends digital audio to your computer. ASIO bypasses the operating system audio driver. The signal chain is that simple. I'm not sure what you mean.
      - grumpyprole 4y ago
        > A DAC is a sampler that sends digital audio to your computer No, DAC means digital-to-analogue convertor. It comes after the computer. Sampling before a computer is done by an ADC. > The signal chain is that simple. No, the software signal chain is not simple.
        Flankk 4y ago
        I know the difference, I'm an engineer. I assumed you were talking about recording since quite obviously you can get a bit-perfect signal from the digital side. It's maybe not so obvious going the other way. There is a persistent myth that digital audio is inferior in some way. The signal chain is not doing any processing. Quantization noise is not audible and can be removed using oversampling. On the other hand analog recording introduces flutter, distortion, and noise that cannot be easily removed.
        ratww 4y ago
        Parent poster clearly means ADC. The rest of the post is absolutely true. > No, the software signal chain is not simple. While the software itself might be complex, the grandparent is right: digital audio data coming out of the ADC doesn’t get transformed in the way you suggested above. There’s no secret compression, transcoding or resampling going on without the knowledge of engineers, as it would add noise and interfere with production techniques. Even things like dithering have to be added separately.
        grumpyprole 4y ago
        Again, I was speaking generally about digital audio, the average consumer has no idea what happens when using audio playback software, USB DACs, AirPlay, Chromecast etc. Even a few of the downloads I have purchased have been resampled (more fraud than secret in that case).
        ratww 4y ago
        Alright. That's totally fair and true, but that's not within the context of this thread, the first post specifically said "music production wise" and this is what all the corrections refer to. Consumer audio, even (or especially!) when things are 10x more expensive than pro products, is definitely a bit of a garbage fire.
    - ratww 4y ago
      Gonna agree with the other replies. That’s definitely not the case for music production. We even use special drivers on some OSs, bypassing the slow paths, and we’re very particular about gain structuring, signal path and everything around our ADCs/DACs, so there’s not much mystery for us there. We’re in control and it’s as perfect as it gets.
      - grumpyprole 4y ago
        > We’re in control and it’s as perfect as it gets. Do you perform bit-perfect tests to be sure? The people who write the software are surely the ones in control.
        ratww 4y ago
        Yes. We use null-cancellation very often as a production/engineering tool, not only as a “test”, so it has to be, otherwise our tricks won’t work.
- damagednoob 4y ago
  I was listening to interview with Brian May and he recounted a story of how they lost fidelity when using analogue tape due to a faulty machine [1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/mgkvU5eCaYo&t=32m13s https://youtu.be/mgkvU5eCaYo&t=32m13s
  - grumpyprole 4y ago
    I don't disagree that digital can be much better than analogue, or that analogue does not have problems.
perch56 4y ago
Came here to say this.
- alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  Everyone into synths came to the comments to all say the same thing :)
Applejinx 4y ago
Not really what the original article was talking about, but sure :) I'm reminded of Behringer building entire factories on the back of a line of reissues of other people's analog synths. They worked out how to build that stuff in modern workflows without compromising the analog signal paths: I've taken apart their newer gear and saw how it was done. All you have to do is not build it like it's a cellphone, and give the audio paths quite a lot of extra signal handling capacity plus some fairly modern circuit board design knowledge. I've got a couple MakeNoise synths that are likewise very modern designs but stand up to anything anyone's ever done, vintage or not. Designing analog circuitry is definitely in a renaissance.
- black_knight 4y ago
  Yes, the new analogue music stuff being produced now is really amazing. For instance, the tracking (ability to produce the correct pitch) on some of the newer eurorack oscillators is amazing across many octaves. Also, everything analogue feels so snappy, compared to doing stuff in “the box”. On a computer, the audio must be buffered whenever transferred between components, and this really adds up to noticeable latency when doing real time stuff. Of course, there is stuff which is not feasible to do in analogue. Spring reverbs are cool, but it is far from digital reverbs like the Valhalla shimmer. (Speaking of telephones, I really miss the times when the phones did not have all this latency. It feels like speaking in a walkie-talkie some times.)
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    > Speaking of telephones, I really miss the times when the phones did not have all this latency. It feels like speaking in a walkie-talkie some times. Amen to that. The number of times that I've gotten into 'we both start talking at the same time' deadlocks on the phone (and video conferencing, for that matter) in the last couple of years has reached high levels of irritation.
    - NavinF 4y ago
      Get a USB audio interface, increase sample rate, and decrease buffer size in the device settings. This has completely eliminated VoIP latency on my system as long as I’m calling people that use Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi. On Linux you’ll also have to mess with pulseaudio settings, but that’s all you need on Windows. In theory a motherboard mic input could offer the same settings, but they (correctly) assume most users have a shitty CPU that can’t handle real time tasks without lag spikes that lead to buffer underruns.
squarefoot 4y ago
+1. There's no way one can build a fully digital audio system; the signal is analog when it is produced and is going to return analog before reaching our ears. Also I don't see analog/digital as mutually exclusive; they're two worlds that very often work together benefiting from the technology of their time; digital chips displaced very soon analog ones in calculators because we didn't and still don't have the technology for example to build ideal or very close to ideal opamps and other parts, but should we one day reach that point, it would be a game changer: as an example, the number of transistors needed for calculating a square root in a couple opamps would then be two orders of magnitude smaller than the simplest processor, not to mention no digital quantization, no clock needed, virtually no delay and way less power consumption. I'm not saying that we could build a analog computer running Doom, in all honesty I can't even imagine how it could do that without involving something digital, but maybe swapping more elements of a digital system with analog ones might be doable one day to get the best of both worlds.
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Remember why ECL lost the battle for the fastest semiconductor process family, though. ECL was several times faster than CMOS for many years, but CMOS's inherent scalability meant that it was profitable to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at improving it. So there was only a narrow window in time when ECL designers like Cray had the upper hand. Once ECL lost the high ground in performance, it was gone forever. You won't encounter it outside of computer museums today, except in very specialized applications. Analog computing is like that, only even more doomed. It doesn't scale. I do think we'll get back to analog eventually, for the same reason our brains aren't digital. But that will look like alien technology compared to what we have now, so there's no near-term incentive to explore it. Right idea, wrong timeframe, probably by a hundred years or more.
conradfr 4y ago
Not really. It will never be over, but digital eats analog a bit more each day.
- black_knight 4y ago
  I think it goes a bit both ways. In the synth world for instance, analogue has made a huge comeback.
  - ratww 4y ago
    Yep. Especially compared to the 80s and 90s when you couldn’t even give a Minimoog away. Even stuff that’s born digital, like samplers, are coming with analog parts today.
- tveyben 4y ago
  Haha - ‘a Bit’…
- _joel 4y ago
  There's been a renaissance in analog, hence why all that early kit is so expensive now. If anything things are moving in the opposite direction
  - ratww 4y ago
    Agreed. If anything, it was in the 90s and early 2000s that almost everyone moved to digital. I remember several keyboardist, guitarist and engineer friends selling all their analog gear for some stuff that is completely obsolete and abandoned by players now. The analog stuff on the other hand sells like hotcakes. Even stuff from the 90s fetches crazy prices. And with the renaissance, people are also buying newly designed analog stuff at an amazing pace.

Music production wise it's as alive as it's ever been.

by _joel 4y ago

Music production wise it's as alive as it's ever been.

Especially as digital signal chains are potentially more lossy: compression, transcoding, resampling. It's very often completely opaque too.

leduyquang753 4y ago
No the producers don't just recompress and resample between every track of the mixer, that would be foolish both quality and performance-wise. The source materials are, if even needed, decoded only once and inside the production software it's always raw sample data.
- grumpyprole 4y ago
  I am speaking generally, it is difficult to be in full control of the signal chain as it is often up to the software and operating systems. Even as someone who just plays music, getting a "bit perfect" feed for my DAC is highly non-trivial.
  - Flankk 4y ago
    A DAC is a sampler that sends digital audio to your computer. ASIO bypasses the operating system audio driver. The signal chain is that simple. I'm not sure what you mean.
    - grumpyprole 4y ago
      > A DAC is a sampler that sends digital audio to your computer No, DAC means digital-to-analogue convertor. It comes after the computer. Sampling before a computer is done by an ADC. > The signal chain is that simple. No, the software signal chain is not simple.
      - Flankk 4y ago
        I know the difference, I'm an engineer. I assumed you were talking about recording since quite obviously you can get a bit-perfect signal from the digital side. It's maybe not so obvious going the other way. There is a persistent myth that digital audio is inferior in some way. The signal chain is not doing any processing. Quantization noise is not audible and can be removed using oversampling. On the other hand analog recording introduces flutter, distortion, and noise that cannot be easily removed.
      - ratww 4y ago
        Parent poster clearly means ADC. The rest of the post is absolutely true. > No, the software signal chain is not simple. While the software itself might be complex, the grandparent is right: digital audio data coming out of the ADC doesn’t get transformed in the way you suggested above. There’s no secret compression, transcoding or resampling going on without the knowledge of engineers, as it would add noise and interfere with production techniques. Even things like dithering have to be added separately.
        grumpyprole 4y ago
        Again, I was speaking generally about digital audio, the average consumer has no idea what happens when using audio playback software, USB DACs, AirPlay, Chromecast etc. Even a few of the downloads I have purchased have been resampled (more fraud than secret in that case).
        ratww 4y ago
        Alright. That's totally fair and true, but that's not within the context of this thread, the first post specifically said "music production wise" and this is what all the corrections refer to. Consumer audio, even (or especially!) when things are 10x more expensive than pro products, is definitely a bit of a garbage fire.
  - ratww 4y ago
    Gonna agree with the other replies. That’s definitely not the case for music production. We even use special drivers on some OSs, bypassing the slow paths, and we’re very particular about gain structuring, signal path and everything around our ADCs/DACs, so there’s not much mystery for us there. We’re in control and it’s as perfect as it gets.
    - grumpyprole 4y ago
      > We’re in control and it’s as perfect as it gets. Do you perform bit-perfect tests to be sure? The people who write the software are surely the ones in control.
      - ratww 4y ago
        Yes. We use null-cancellation very often as a production/engineering tool, not only as a “test”, so it has to be, otherwise our tricks won’t work.
damagednoob 4y ago
I was listening to interview with Brian May and he recounted a story of how they lost fidelity when using analogue tape due to a faulty machine [1]. [1]: https://youtu.be/mgkvU5eCaYo&t=32m13s https://youtu.be/mgkvU5eCaYo&t=32m13s
- grumpyprole 4y ago
  I don't disagree that digital can be much better than analogue, or that analogue does not have problems.

perch56 4y ago

Came here to say this.

alfiedotwtf 4y ago
Everyone into synths came to the comments to all say the same thing :)

Applejinx 4y ago

Not really what the original article was talking about, but sure :) I'm reminded of Behringer building entire factories on the back of a line of reissues of other people's analog synths. They worked out how to build that stuff in modern workflows without compromising the analog signal paths: I've taken apart their newer gear and saw how it was done. All you have to do is not build it like it's a cellphone, and give the audio paths quite a lot of extra signal handling capacity plus some fairly modern circuit board design knowledge. I've got a couple MakeNoise synths that are likewise very modern designs but stand up to anything anyone's ever done, vintage or not. Designing analog circuitry is definitely in a renaissance.

black_knight 4y ago
Yes, the new analogue music stuff being produced now is really amazing. For instance, the tracking (ability to produce the correct pitch) on some of the newer eurorack oscillators is amazing across many octaves. Also, everything analogue feels so snappy, compared to doing stuff in “the box”. On a computer, the audio must be buffered whenever transferred between components, and this really adds up to noticeable latency when doing real time stuff. Of course, there is stuff which is not feasible to do in analogue. Spring reverbs are cool, but it is far from digital reverbs like the Valhalla shimmer. (Speaking of telephones, I really miss the times when the phones did not have all this latency. It feels like speaking in a walkie-talkie some times.)
- jacquesm 4y ago
  > Speaking of telephones, I really miss the times when the phones did not have all this latency. It feels like speaking in a walkie-talkie some times. Amen to that. The number of times that I've gotten into 'we both start talking at the same time' deadlocks on the phone (and video conferencing, for that matter) in the last couple of years has reached high levels of irritation.
  - NavinF 4y ago
    Get a USB audio interface, increase sample rate, and decrease buffer size in the device settings. This has completely eliminated VoIP latency on my system as long as I’m calling people that use Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi. On Linux you’ll also have to mess with pulseaudio settings, but that’s all you need on Windows. In theory a motherboard mic input could offer the same settings, but they (correctly) assume most users have a shitty CPU that can’t handle real time tasks without lag spikes that lead to buffer underruns.

squarefoot 4y ago

+1. There's no way one can build a fully digital audio system; the signal is analog when it is produced and is going to return analog before reaching our ears. Also I don't see analog/digital as mutually exclusive; they're two worlds that very often work together benefiting from the technology of their time; digital chips displaced very soon analog ones in calculators because we didn't and still don't have the technology for example to build ideal or very close to ideal opamps and other parts, but should we one day reach that point, it would be a game changer: as an example, the number of transistors needed for calculating a square root in a couple opamps would then be two orders of magnitude smaller than the simplest processor, not to mention no digital quantization, no clock needed, virtually no delay and way less power consumption. I'm not saying that we could build a analog computer running Doom, in all honesty I can't even imagine how it could do that without involving something digital, but maybe swapping more elements of a digital system with analog ones might be doable one day to get the best of both worlds.

CamperBob2 4y ago
Remember why ECL lost the battle for the fastest semiconductor process family, though. ECL was several times faster than CMOS for many years, but CMOS's inherent scalability meant that it was profitable to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at improving it. So there was only a narrow window in time when ECL designers like Cray had the upper hand. Once ECL lost the high ground in performance, it was gone forever. You won't encounter it outside of computer museums today, except in very specialized applications. Analog computing is like that, only even more doomed. It doesn't scale. I do think we'll get back to analog eventually, for the same reason our brains aren't digital. But that will look like alien technology compared to what we have now, so there's no near-term incentive to explore it. Right idea, wrong timeframe, probably by a hundred years or more.

conradfr 4y ago

Not really. It will never be over, but digital eats analog a bit more each day.

black_knight 4y ago
I think it goes a bit both ways. In the synth world for instance, analogue has made a huge comeback.
- ratww 4y ago
  Yep. Especially compared to the 80s and 90s when you couldn’t even give a Minimoog away. Even stuff that’s born digital, like samplers, are coming with analog parts today.
tveyben 4y ago
Haha - ‘a Bit’…
_joel 4y ago
There's been a renaissance in analog, hence why all that early kit is so expensive now. If anything things are moving in the opposite direction
- ratww 4y ago
  Agreed. If anything, it was in the 90s and early 2000s that almost everyone moved to digital. I remember several keyboardist, guitarist and engineer friends selling all their analog gear for some stuff that is completely obsolete and abandoned by players now. The analog stuff on the other hand sells like hotcakes. Even stuff from the 90s fetches crazy prices. And with the renaissance, people are also buying newly designed analog stuff at an amazing pace.