A compendium on SR and bit depth - Ableton's sound quality

[anybody human]

I just have to say this. Finally there are some constructive, technical points being discussed here

agree, but wanna say this present topic has been interesting and troll-free from the first post (just 1 or 2 misreadings, quickly wiped out).

it IS really interesting.

Who are you arguing against? Everybody here, at least in this present topic, is interested by those questions.
Don't bring back the war you are saying you don't want to happen here again, please

Agreed. I saw a couple posts going in the same old direction and overreacted myself. Sorry. This did turn out to be a serious, polite discussion. Thanks, it is an interesting topic.

[Angstrom]

An important note to anyone testing, pay close attention to the buttons and prefs marked "hi-Q" as these handle the up/down-sampling antialiasing filters. If hiQ is off you will alias freqs like crazy when shifting samplerates

[locojohn]

An important note to anyone testing, pay close attention to the buttons and prefs marked "hi-Q" as these handle the up/down-sampling antialiasing filters. If hiQ is off you will alias freqs like crazy when shifting samplerates

According to the Live manual, HiQ works when up/down-sampling samples within the project to project's sample rate. In my test Live set all samples are at project's sample rate so I presume there is no difference if HiQ mode is on or off for these samples. Therefore, HiQ is not important in this testing scenario.

There's a good advice in the manual to think of project's sample rate before creating the project itself and recording samples for it.

Andrejs

[Khazul]

For all these people who winge about the quality of a DAWs 'mixing engine' - can any of you specifically state what it is you dont like about the end result?


Adding or mutiplying two numbers with IEEE 754 32bit math is going to yield the same result on a knackered old computer from the 80s (unless it was one of the buggy early P5 processors) or on a modern CPU in a modern DAW.

There are differences in dithering and particularly sample rate reduction algorythms. There are differences in the way pan controls work (in how the divide the levels acros two channels). There are huge differences bettween subsequent Mp3 encoders - for eg, if you are using Cubase, you might be using the built in converter, while with Live you will use whatever you can find (which may be better or alot worse).

Clean phase linear basic parameteric EQ algorthms are pretty much the same across DAWs and non-character plugins, so *IF* it is possible to acheive identical settinsg on two EQs, then I would be very impressed if you could tell the difference.

Compressors - same applies except most compressors have there own response curves built in that are not tweakable - hence why they sound different - even bnefore you get into character plugins.

IMHO - THE biggst difference between 'mix engines' - ie DAWs is in how any given user takes to its user interface. I find that with some DAWS and some plugins that I know are not inferior, I allways have problem getting what I want out of them, whereas with others is easy - with EQs and compressors this is particular the case and often depends upon how visual (or actually - distracting) their UIs, and how the controls repond (linear, non linear etc).

With ableton Live you have yet another opptunity to completely fuck up your mix through its audio warping - having a track accidently warped when it shouldnt be getting warped can also really make something sound terrible.

[oblique strategies]

one topic found here:

Hi,

you're right, exporting currently uses one core only. We hope to improve this in the future but it is out of scope for Live 8.

I will discuss with our documentation writer how we can best include more information about the whole topic.

Best, Friedemann

http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... 0&start=15

Great link -excellent info.

[Pasha]

Every DAW from freeware such as Ardour on Linux and shareware such as Reaper through to the expensive mainstream, established DAWS gives you the platform to produce great music, so long as you got the knowledge and the skills.

... And skills is what I need. This sound fairly complicated so everybody can make mistakes or forget about something.
That's why Audio Cards on the high end can do crazy SR and Bit Depth. However I noticed that switching from 44.1 Khz 24bits to 96 Khz
32 bits make my CPU load grow like crazy. It seems that people with low end machines simply cannot afford better export quality.
Is this true?

[supamonsta]

@ Anybody human : no problem, I am a troll

@ Khazul : your statements may be 100% true, but no one here is comparing DAW sound engines, maybe you should read the thread? (I too was thinking it was another DAW comparison thread at the beginning, but, no.)

@ Pasha : this is true too, but 24bits/44khz is already really, really good enough for our needs.

this thread is becoming more and more interesting, and we seem to have managed to get out of the classical "DAW A sums bettter than DAW B"!!

sorry for the trolling

[alex.the.forge]

3) all files are MP3s 320K (thought you'd do 128?) and that may erase/minimise any difference?

yes this would seem to make the whole exercise futile.... MP3 compression removes a lot of stuff that would be relevant to the test