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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 3, 2007 5:48:09 GMT -7
I said I'd do this a long time ago, and I've truly been meaning to get to it. But when my computer crashed and I had to rebuild the whole shebang - well that took priority! Meanwhile I've gotten rustier and rustier, but I hope you can forgive my ham handed playing in these clips. I thought a long time about how to demonstrate what I perceive as very tiny differences between no attenuation and full attenuation with the Airbrake. And while I had the recorder set up, why not throw the Hot Plate in there and get some data on that one too? The idea here is to make the recordings and present them in such a way as to remove the Fletcher-Munson effect you get when you listen to your amp live. Once all the recordings were made, I thought, why not present them un-identified, so you don't come into the listening with a prececeived bias one way or the other. Have a listen - see if you can tell any difference at all between these clips. I'm certain you'll be able to hear some minor differences, because I'm half deaf and I can hear them. But are the differences so dramatic that you can't possibly consider attenuating? I don't think so. In fact, I think you'll be surprised how close these all sound. The setup: Grosh Tele > Dr. Z Prescription ES > Attenuator > Weber Ceramic Blue Dog The method: Record a short piece at each attenuator setting, compensating for the lowered volume using the level controls on the studio mixer. Then use Normalize in Sound Forge to set each clip to -.02db on the largest peak. This makes every recording nearly exactly the same level, even though attenuation was present. All attenuator positions are represented, but the bedroom level on each attenuator was left at maximum. The clips: strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000001.mp3strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000002.mp3strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000003.mp3strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000004.mp3strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000005.mp3strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000006.mp3strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000010.mp3strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000011.mp3strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000012.mp3strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000013.mp3strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000014.mp3I'll post the "identities" of each clip in about a week.
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Post by ruger9 on Jul 3, 2007 6:28:31 GMT -7
THANK YOU. I've been waiting for a soundclip thread like this for 2 years... ironically, it comes the same time the RxJr will soon be available! I couldn't tell much of a difference on any of the clips... not enough to really matter, IMHO. A little more or less clarity here & there, but so little of a difference as to not matter, at least to me. Question: did you use the amp's or board's EQ at all to try to boost the highs under heavy attenuation? Because if you didn't, that's probably all I'm hearing. I'm anxious to see which clips were "no attenuation" & "bedroom"...
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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 3, 2007 7:12:28 GMT -7
THANK YOU. I've been waiting for a soundclip thread like this for 2 years... ironically, it comes the same time the RxJr will soon be available! I couldn't tell much of a difference on any of the clips... not enough to really matter, IMHO. A little more or less clarity here & there, but so little of a difference as to not matter, at least to me. Question: did you use the amp's or board's EQ at all to try to boost the highs under heavy attenuation? Because if you didn't, that's probably all I'm hearing. I'm anxious to see which clips were "no attenuation" & "bedroom"... Nope. The only differences between all of those clips is the position of the attenuation switch, and the position of the faders on the mic inputs on my mixer. Well, and half of them are the Airbrake and the other half are the Hot Plate. Pretty surprising, no?
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Post by ruger9 on Jul 3, 2007 7:25:54 GMT -7
VERY surprising... in a POSITIVE WAY. Great test Benntop!
I'm just trying to figure out which gear to sell to call Willcutt's and get on the list for an RxJr... may or may NOT be using an attenuator with that one (for mostly home playing)... depends on how well that MV works!
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Post by billyguitar on Jul 3, 2007 7:32:11 GMT -7
If it works as well as Z's other master volumes it wouldn't be necessary for me.
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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 3, 2007 7:32:28 GMT -7
Well I hope the point is clear. People hear a tone difference as they attenuate. I have always said that is because of physiological effects that have nothing to do with the well designed attenuator. I think this series helps support my contention, but I could still be mistaken. Doing this kind of test usually has some secondary or tertiary issue that the tester failed to consider. I'm just waiting for the more scientific of the group to point those out.
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Post by ruger9 on Jul 3, 2007 7:49:57 GMT -7
I think you did a great job in factoring out those factors you mentioned. Volume & air movement is a huge factor is "perception" of tone, and you have successfully (IMHO) eliminated those & shown that a well-designed attenuator does in fact do it's job VERY well, despite what the "perceptions" are.
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Post by GuitarZ on Jul 3, 2007 9:15:47 GMT -7
Okay, I've got my guesses at the settings. I'm curious to see how close or how far away I am.
I thought that I heard some differences from least atten to the most, but we'll see whether my ears worked or my mind.
For my sound, the attenuator gets me the closest because I really like the power amp crunch in the Z. I'll take a slight difference versus running the master volume down. But, that's me.
Thanks for the work on these Benttop. I've been meaning to do it too, but I guess that I'm too lazy.
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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 3, 2007 17:29:10 GMT -7
I think you'll be surprised at a couple of things - I know I was.
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Post by Chris_Ferreira on Jul 3, 2007 18:10:14 GMT -7
Great playing Steve.
I love these "blind" sound tests.
I will be getting an attenuator hopefully around the same time I get my Z-best, so I'm very interested in this topic.
I don't have the best ear but I thought I noticed a few differences here and there. Compared to Clip 1, 2 definitely sounded somewhat muffled in comparison, less bright. I thought I noticed a similar muffling going from Clip 5 to Clip 6, although 4 and 5 sounded identical to me.
14 sounds like it has a lot of grit or "hair" in the tone, but sounds kind of compressed and even somewhat quieter when compared to 13. To me 14 sounds like it was pretty heavily attenuated.
Can't wait for the results to see how wrong I am.
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Post by highway61south on Jul 3, 2007 18:49:48 GMT -7
That was nice of you to that for everybody.....Sterling
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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 3, 2007 18:59:18 GMT -7
That was nice of you to that for everybody.....Sterling Thanks, but I live for this stuff... That's why none of my clips sound like music, but instead sound like a chainsaw race.
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Post by Jan on Jul 3, 2007 21:56:17 GMT -7
Since I make some claims of practicing science, I will take a stab at this. It seems to me that for your data to be as transparent as possible, you will need to capture signal out from the guitar and then use that one signal as a repeatable input for your varied signal out tests. You would then need to normalize all of the signal outs for maximum levels since it is pretty well agreed that we tend to let our brains think that louder is better. Whether you normalized the output level with the amp controls as part of the recording process or via software afterwards opens up whole new vistas of minutia to obsess over. Even if you think you play the same set of riffs exactly alike, you are not going to get 3 or 4 or 10 of them anywhere near exactly the same dynamic range to be a valid test. Maybe Itzhak Perlman could, but us regular folk probably not so much. After hearing randomized output a few times, the geek in me would then want to look at the samples with a spectrum analyzer to compare my perceptions with reality. Whether that takes some fun out of the process may have something to do with your geek quotient.
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Post by Jan on Jul 3, 2007 21:58:03 GMT -7
Nice clips, Steve. Never mind the geeky stuff in my other post. Nice work.
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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 3, 2007 22:41:02 GMT -7
Nice clips, Steve. Never mind the geeky stuff in my other post. Nice work. Thanks. I agree with your geeky stuff though. I just didn't feel like going to all that bother. I've never had very good luck recording the guitar and re-amping - need to perfect that somehow here, but as you know, the output of my recorder is not the same impedance as the output of my guitar, so that changes things. I could probably run the recorder into a divider network to try to make the recorder output seem like a guitar, but there it is - more effort than I'm willing to do. Pink noise would be a lot more accurate, with a nice spectrum analyzer (I've had the jones for a nice one of those here for a long time) but I don't have any of that junk around here... Nawp, you get what you pay for with my test.
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Post by Jan on Jul 4, 2007 17:30:10 GMT -7
Would one of those looping, recording, pedal things like a Boss RC do it?
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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 4, 2007 22:56:30 GMT -7
Would one of those looping, recording, pedal things like a Boss RC do it? Hmmm... hadn't thought of one of those. Yeah, it probably could actually. Have to think on that - I have a Boss DD-20 here...
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Post by drew on Jul 5, 2007 12:43:28 GMT -7
Hey Steve, Very cool experiment. I couldn't tell what setting or attenuators were being used. They all sounded similar, plus pick attack and how the notes are played make a huge difference. Initially I thought that 6 had more zing but then as I took a second listen they all started to sound similar. I've been a fan of attenuation (with the exception that I have to carry around another device to hook up) and have thought that speaker response via the wattage sent to it made more of a difference to the overall impact than amp attenuation devices. With the exception of extreme attenuation settings.
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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 5, 2007 12:52:31 GMT -7
Hey Steve, Very cool experiment. I couldn't tell what setting or attenuators were being used. They all sounded similar, plus pick attack and how the notes are played make a huge difference. Initially I thought that 6 had more zing but then as I took a second listen they all started to sound similar. I've been a fan of attenuation (with the exception that I have to carry around another device to hook up) and have thought that speaker response via the wattage sent to it made more of a difference to the overall impact than amp attenuation devices. With the exception of extreme attenuation settings. That's actually why I did this experiment the way I did it. You'll notice that these were all produced via picking up the output of the speaker. You can read into that whatever you like, but I like to think the greatest contributor to hearing major differences between unattenuated and attenuated is our brains, and the way they process sounds at different levels. Our ears are non-linear, and our brains don't seem to compensate for that. So softer sounds have less treble and less bass (although by different factors), and may sound more compressed than louder sounds. I guess my point is I hate it when I see people grousing about these very things in the context of their attenuator experience. I happen to think the ones I have are pretty darn good, and I hope these clips make some headway in the direction of demonstrating that. I think if I did this again, I would try to eliminate the playing variable. It would no doubt be tedious listening to fifteen clips that all had the exact same mistakes in them, but at least they would all be identical.
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Post by Jan on Jul 5, 2007 15:17:49 GMT -7
After a couple of iterations our brains will fill in what it thought was missing. The subtleties lost in the MP3 process are real and important. Unless you spend more for computer speakers than a MIM Tele you would not hear much detail anyway. Oh bother... (I love quoting Winnie the Pooh)
I will just fall back to plan b consider Steve to be an expert witness and take it on faith. That is working well enough for me so far. *
* the original message had emoticons and other details that were cut off by the compression algorithm
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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 5, 2007 16:02:11 GMT -7
After a couple of iterations our brains will fill in what it thought was missing. The subtleties lost in the MP3 process are real and important. Unless you spend more for computer speakers than a MIM Tele you would not hear much detail anyway. Oh bother... (I love quoting Winnie the Pooh) I will just fall back to plan b consider Steve to be an expert witness and take it on faith. That is working well enough for me so far. * * the original message had emoticons and other details that were cut off by the compression algorithm Hmm... well, these mp3's were created at very high quality, so they should be as good as CD, but who knows. But I like the 'expert witness' moniker... I had a sort of epiphany on the way home from work tonight. I think I realized something that had not occurred to me before, and it is simply this: Some folks don't like what happens to their power amp when they attenuate and turn up. They just don't care for the added compression, and the power tube saturation. And they say the attenuator is at fault, but in reality if they were playing without it at the same output, they would likely think something was wrong with their amp. The important thing is that this would dramatically complicate the reasons folks react the way they do to attenuators, because now there are two effects that come into play - the FM effect, and the natural power amp overdrive effect. Either one, or both, could be in play when someone decides they think the attenuator sucks. I hope though that it is clearer via these clips that attenuators really don't color the tone very much at all, nor do they mangle your dynamics very much. That's all your amp and the FM curve (ie, your ears) at play.
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Post by sonicgator on Jul 5, 2007 18:55:55 GMT -7
Regardless of the setting, the RXES sounds great!
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Post by Jan on Jul 6, 2007 17:51:08 GMT -7
Steve, I think there are parallels in your epiphany an something that has bothered me for years about the decline in quality of CD music. The current trends in "re-mastering" is only making it worse. This article explains why. I have been thinking about starting a thread in z-lounge with that article as a starting point.
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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 6, 2007 18:06:01 GMT -7
Steve, I think there are parallels in your epiphany an something that has bothered me for years about the decline in quality of CD music. The current trends in "re-mastering" is only making it worse. This article explains why. I have been thinking about starting a thread in z-lounge with that article as a starting point. Good article, and I agree with what he's saying. Commercial CD's are bad enough, but the online purchases are not very good in this regard. MP3 files can sound very good, but the sacrifice is gigantic files. And even the best have less dynamic range than an old vinyl LP. It is kind of sad, isn't it? Dynamics are very important in a band, and why some bands drive me batty. So much sound going on there isn't a moment of silence. A rest is just as valid a musical expression as a note! Anyway, as to the subject at hand here, you're right that the limited dynamic range in the mp3 files works against hearing what you really hear live. We are prisoners of this limited technology!
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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 9, 2007 5:53:55 GMT -7
OK, I said I'd wait a week, and it will be a week tomorrow. Here is the promised identities:
strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000001.mp3 - Airbrake, thru strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000002.mp3 - Airbrake, one click down strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000003.mp3 - Airbrake, two clicks down strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000004.mp3 - Airbrake, three clicks down strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000005.mp3 - Airbrake, four clicks down strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000006.mp3 - Airbrake, five clicks down (bedroom) strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000010.mp3 - Hot Plate, thru strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000011.mp3 - Hot Plate, -4db strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000012.mp3 - Hot Plate, -8db strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000013.mp3 - Hot Plate, -12db strayca.com/gear/audio/attenuators/000014.mp3 - Hot Plate, -16db (bedroom) I said I had some obeservations. The main one is that I feel there is a fairly large difference between the Airbrake and the Hot Plate. Much larger than I had realized. Compare the two "thru" clips - I hear much more bottom on the Airbrake clip, and I hear added distortion on the Hot Plate clip - even in the Thru setting! Clearly, the Hot Plate thru position is not actually thru. Another way to say it, for the Hot Plate, thru is not true bypass. The other observation is that across the board, it seems to me the Hot Plate contributes some distortion that isn't there with the Airbrake. It may or may not be pleasing, but it sounds to me as if it is there nonetheless. After making these clips, I hooked my Airbrake to the THD Flexi-50 (I had never done this before) and the amp responded with a much cleaner sound. So much so that if I was to gig the Flexi with the Airbrake, I would change the gain settings a bit. Nothing dramatic, but isn't this an interesting finding? It makes me want to go back and do a more controlled experiment to see if I can quantify what my ears are telling me. Bottom line - the Airbrake is a great attenuator! The Hot Plate is good too, but I feel it will work best in situations where the distortion it adds doesn't negatively affect the tone the guitarist is attempting to achieve. I gigged my 8 ohm Hot Plate continuously for three years, and loved the sounds I was getting. So as with every other aspect of this whole tone search, YMMV. That said, I'm switching my gigging rig to two Airbrakes.
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Post by GuitarZ on Jul 9, 2007 7:25:04 GMT -7
Interesting. I got pretty darn close. The odd one is that I pegged #14 to be slight attenuation.
So, my point of reference is listening to this stuff in my studio with headphones on. I haven't played out in a while. So, my normal listening set-up is pretty close to BentTop's test set-up.
Thanks for the work.
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Post by ruger9 on Jul 9, 2007 7:28:29 GMT -7
Amazing, and quite surprising. Sheer VOLUME, not whether the signal is running thru an attenuator, really does make all the difference. Great experiment! This should be on a website somewhere for future reference. NOW, benttop, you need to do a similar experiment with attenuator vs. master volume! (of course, you'd NEED an amp with a master volume...)
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Post by benttop (Steve) on Jul 9, 2007 7:33:53 GMT -7
Amazing, and quite surprising. Sheer VOLUME, not whether the signal is running thru an attenuator, really does make all the difference. Great experiment! This should be on a website somewhere for future reference. NOW, benttop, you need to do a similar experiment with attenuator vs. master volume! (of course, you'd NEED an amp with a master volume...) Hmmm... interesting idea, but I'm not sure I could prove anything. Have to think on that one for a while. I just added some of my impressions to the reveal post if you didn't see it.
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Post by ruger9 on Jul 9, 2007 8:25:40 GMT -7
Half-kidding. It would be interesting to hear similar comparisons of attenuator vs. master volumes, just to REALLY hear what the differences are, sheer volume aside. I know the differences in function of MV vs. attenuator (not as much simgnal going to power tubes, etc.), and the MV surely changes the tone far more than an attenuator, but it would be cool to hear how a "good" master volume (which I've heard Z amps have, among others) compares to an attenuator.
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Post by drew on Jul 9, 2007 9:19:35 GMT -7
Interesting stuff to ponder. The best tone comes when you feel your pant leggs quiver after a thundering power chord.
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