Live`s inferior audio engine, urban myth ?

Vercengetorex · Post by **Vercengetorex** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 9:08 am

Rogue Ameoba has a pretty great little peice of software there in AudioHijack Pro...

Personally I dont see the need for all of these "rendering" plugins in Live (or at least not in v4) with the all to powerfull routing scheme. However I avoid ALL the proported rendering/summing problems by doing stem mixes in Live outputting across 10 analog outputs being mixed to analog tape. Quite effective, and with nice enugh converters avoids artifacts altogether. I like to compose/edit @ 24bit/48kHz, however 16bit/44.1kHz is obviously required for CD, and that downsampling process is messy even in high-end mastering studios. Using an analog intermediary allows me to skip that horribly messy mathmatical conversion and re-record @ 16bit/44.1kHz getting a perfect signal at full (16bit) dynamic range.

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 9:17 am

raapie wrote:People who say 32 bit floiting point sounds better are talking bull. Your soundcard can not play 32 floiting sounds, so they are converted to 16 or 24 bit.

Processing at 32 bit will be more exact and artifacts will be less audible than at 16 bits, I should think.

-Paws

rikhyray · Post by **rikhyray** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 10:27 am

Interesting, so everybody is right ? Those unhappy with Live`s sound are the render users while the happy ones record hardwire like Fax or virtual like Adam.
Now, as much as I trust and mistrust our ears would like to know if there are any minus points of doing it virtual way.
Fax, you tried to do it virtually with Adobe and didint like the result ? BTW I checked it with Wavelab and it is not possible( at leats with Indigo card), but Auditon can be hooked. I was already considering getting Auditon for only that reason but perhaps it is not worth.
I hope that somebody from Ableton can say something about all that, I mean the practical solution, we are not bashing Live here, just looking for the best final mix , whatever it takes.

FaX-01 · Post by **FaX-01** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 10:37 am

Adobe is a killer audio editor though I'll say that for it.
I just don't like the sound of entire mixes through it for some strange reason.
It also does redbook masters and anything over -3db VU in Adobe clips like a bitch from my experience - maybe I'm doing something wrong but the method I use now works fine.

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 11:27 am

in my defense, i also come from the school of letting it all hang out. i've never been specifically concerned with audio quality. What i mean is to me things either sound "good" or "bad". Its really (the only thing that is) black & white to me.
I mean my favorite producer is King Tubby for christ's sake! He wasn't exactly the poster boy for pristine sound quality, but he used what he had and in the end that "colored" sound he got turned out to be one of the things that defined him.
I've done 12" releases that were produced on an MPC and mixed through a $200 behringer mixer. Some were done all in Reason and recorded to 2track realtime with Total Recorder. Alot of them had signal to noise ratios that some folks on this board would have a coronary over, yet many people in the techno community enjoyed djing, dancing, and listening to them.
If i spent time the last few years worrying about what to me is a small technicality, i would not have been nearly as productive. To me the workflow comes in first far ahead of the subtle nuances of the output quality. Crap through a pristine signal path is pristine crap in the end.

This post-modern strive for perfection stifles art in my opinion. Dali painted with imperfect brushes and Mascagni composed on out of tune pianos.

Perfection is a religious concept, not an artistic one.
and don't forget that Limitations breed creativity.

Use what you got to the best of your ability and try not to dwell on its imperfections. Those imperfections just might define you 30 years later.

fatrabbit · Post by **fatrabbit** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 12:56 pm

Excellent post AdamJay. I agree.

rikhyray · Post by **rikhyray** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 1:25 pm

I feel you Adam and agree 100%. The way I take it , learn as much as possible, to absolute maximum about technical aspect, quality, once set I want , I must forget about it. It is what I learned in music, went through discipline of 12-14 hours daily practice, daily classes with my master, for years . Before I was to go for my first grand recital my guru told me " remember the audience is neither your guru, neither your student, forget all you learned and just play."
So this setting up, searching in internet, finding best possible quality is like doing scales, studying music theory etc,etc,. Probably I am more comfortable with Live then any other software, cause it allows me to be musician/artist, with other I am just half technician (lousy one), half musician. I suppose it is not just me.

raapie · Post by **raapie** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 3:37 pm

some of the arguments given here can only be proven by a blindfolt test and we can't do that. or can we?

never mind. digital audio sounds great thesedays if you keep your music dynamic. I have seen a lot of people talking about 24/96 blabla and showing me mastered songs with zero dynamics (at least 9 out of 10 cd's are mastered so badly the rms values are almost the same as their peak values). if thats't the case: 4 bits is enough

melocoton · Post by **melocoton** » Thu Oct 21, 2004 11:52 pm

AdamJay wrote: I mean my favorite producer is King Tubby for christ's sake! He wasn't exactly the poster boy for pristine sound quality, but he used what he had and in the end that "colored" sound he got turned out to be one of the things that defined him.

But King Tubby used an API console! Maybe Lee Perry would be a better example? A lot of the shitty sound on dub releases may just be bad CD masters from vinyl sources.

Anyway, I think the idea that the live output from Live is better from the "Render to Disk" function is totally insane. If anything, rendering will be more accurate. I mean Live's playback actually slows down if your project is too big! There's no way I would trust a recording of the Live output since I've often heard the feel of the track start to drag and get a little weird when getting close to full cpu usage.

JAMM · Post by **JAMM** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 1:54 am

I like the punchy and low bottom sound of live. It really kicks ass when played loud over a PA system. As a (former)guitar player i also liked
tube amplifiers better than transistor amplifiers. There is a thing called
"harmonic distortion" produced by tube-amps and for a strange reason a lot of people like harmonic distortion because it feels more "natural".
I get the same feeling using live.

greetinz Jamm

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 2:16 am

melocoton wrote: But King Tubby used an API console! Maybe Lee Perry would be a better example? A lot of the shitty sound on dub releases may just be bad CD masters from vinyl sources.

nah mate, i'm talking about the vinyl. more specifically the 10" V/A's with John Clarke, Freddie McGregor, Ronnie Davis, etc.

and tubby used an API? news to me!

drush · Post by **drush** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 2:31 am

speaking of Tubby, indirectly (and directly at least once that i know of), i assume you're familiar with Francois K's Deep Space mondays in NYC?

Vercengetorex · Post by **Vercengetorex** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 3:20 am

Woah, if you are getting unexpected tempo changes, then there is something severely wrong Mellocoton. I can push my CPU to 100 percent and I get mutes, not tempo drops. Perhaps you should investigate your problem a bit more...

nils · Post by **nils** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 1:13 pm

yeah, I really think sound quality is good to!! I haven`t used it for a long time, but the punch and high vol-levels are not to be mistaken... today I played som vinyl through it, monitoring using those efx and Im really impressed. This is super cool! U can increase the level a whole lot but it still sounds great.

melocoton · Post by **melocoton** » Fri Oct 22, 2004 3:33 pm

Vercengetorex wrote:Woah, if you are getting unexpected tempo changes, then there is something severely wrong Mellocoton. I can push my CPU to 100 percent and I get mutes, not tempo drops. Perhaps you should investigate your problem a bit more...

Hmm, I thought that was the standard behavior for Live. It has always worked that way for me. Anyway, I'll look into it. Thanks.

Live`s inferior audio engine, urban myth ?

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Jamm