The fact that you feel at liberty to make criticisms about stuff that you can easily ignore makes you seem presumptuous, hypocritical and mean spirited.


best regards,
mike

Well, how about if someone explains it and you don't agree with it?


Do we have to agree before you agree to be polite?




BTW, I wouldn't just focus myopically on the "wall wart"... the 12v part can also be considered. For example, someone might interject the idea that a 24v wall wart may also be considered.

Someone else might suggest that 12v wall warts have differing amperage capabilities... which may be pertinent when another person points out that a voltage regulator down the line may or may not nullify the consideration of the wall warts voltage... or it may just add a subtle difference in perspective.

A discussion like that will hardly fit in a single post.  





Anyways, now that you've taken a Beagle on the idea I have lost my enthusiasm for discussing it today... but it's pretty basic audio engineering stuff so I'm confident that anyone that actually wants to can follow the question and see ideas that could be introduced to the discussion.







Here are some examples of how the question I have asked might apply to this conversation:

Does the Apogee One have as much headroom as the Apogee Symphony? Is there a very easy and obvious reason why they are different?


Does the MOTU Ultralight have as much Headroom as the MOTU 192 with the very same akm converters? Is there a very easy and obvious reason why they are different?

If those kinds of questions make you curious... have fun with it. I think it's fun stuff I hope you do to.







If those kinds of questions offend your sensibility and make you want to dump a Beagle... please just do it in the bushes instead of publiclly demonstrating a hunger for conflict and a revelry in misunderstanding. 

In other words... please just ignore me. I didn't make the first post to fuel your anger... so please just ignore it if you don't think you want to enjoy having a discussion about it.



best regards,
mike

drewfx1




A few points:

In terms of things like digital amp sims (and also some synths), anytime you create distortion (or certain synth waveforms) you are creating high frequencies which will cause aliasing in digital. But for this reason in the modern world (where CPU power is abundant) any competent programmer upsamples their amp sim/synth plugins internally to avoid this problem. So it's not clear why running at higher rates is of any benefit for modern plugins (assuming whatever "quality" settings they have are set to their highest settings). If it was beneficial to upsample even more, the programmers just should have made an even higher quality setting available. Older plugins may or may not be a different story.

Hi Drew some knowledgeable, relevant good sense as usual.  Regarding the above point though did you read the article by Bootsy I linked which covers this particular subject from his view point?
 
@McQ
 
What are the headroom difference between the interfaces Rain has asked about and how would they affect him in the context of this discussion or in regard to making an informed choice between them?
 
If you don't know I'd suggest you are adding a layer of complicated irrelevance to the discussion by throwing out a cryptic reference to wall warts and creating an idea that there is some doubt as to what he should choose here, when for all practical purposes there isn't.  What's more you should know it, so yep a deserved 'Snark' award yet again. 
Furthermore without some intensive and critical appraisal of your own conduct and interaction with the majority of members on this board I would suggest that you least of all is in a position to judge anyone as being 'mean spirited' and certainly not Beagle. 
 
That IS an area I where could post a list of tangible pros and cons and make a valid choice based on preferred characteristics and here's a clue it wouldn't be for McQ. 
 
As far as headroom goes I would suggest it is very unlikely that you will ever be able to extract yours from where it seems presently to be securely stuck.
 
Even the most lowly in-built Realtek audio codec built in to a cheap motherboard will provide you with headroom to burn for most musical audio production requirements so how is you posing this question 'adding' to this discussion?  What would be the purpose?
 
So we can all be impressed with McQ's ability to skin farts once more?

Good question. :-)

you're entitled to your opinion Bub.

so is Mike and so am I.

and we all have the right to be here and we all have the right to say what we feel.

I'm sorry the thread has been ruined for you.

Beagle

you're entitled to your opinion Bub.

so is Mike and so am I.

and we all have the right to be here and we all have the right to say what we feel.

I'm sorry the thread has been ruined for you.

Almost everything the guy says lately is followed by someone making a snide comment to him and putting him down personally ... it's something I've never seen happen to any other member here to this frequency. I just don't get it?

I had another sentence in my post and it's not there now? What he heck?

I did have in there, "I grew up and blocked John a while ago rather than go back and forth with him all the time and I think the forum is a much better place for it."

That's really weird that it got deleted, I must have done it ... but uh ... how?

Doo doo doo doo

doo doo doo doo

:)

Bub
I just don't get it?

I really hope it stays that way for you, meanwhile it might be an idea to think that some of are not just picking at someone for the sake of it and there may be a flame where the smoke comes from.
 
If you are in disagreement with what I said to McQ on this thread then disagree I'm fine with that, but personally his reference to wall warts and outburst following being called out on it is what destroyed any good-will this thread had going for it.  And again we have to ask what was it for, was it relevant to the discussion, was it designed to help the OP in anyway?  Nope.  Not as far as I could tell.
 
The considerations of a power supply contributing to the headroom on an interface will be a choice made by a much more capable engineer than McQ (and likely most every one here) at the interfaces design stage.
 
If he gets that bit wrong the card will be a turkey and no one would touch it, period.  It wouldn't even be in the frame for a discussion. 

Bub

Jonbouy

Bub
I just don't get it?

I really hope it stays that way for you, meanwhile it might be an idea to think that some of are not just picking at someone for the sake of it and there may be a flame where the smoke comes from.

If you are in disagreement with what I said to McQ on this thread then disagree I'm fine with that, but personally his reference to wall warts and outburst following being called out on it is what destroyed any good-will this thread had going for it.  And again we have to ask what was it for, was it relevant to the discussion, was it designed to help the OP in anyway?  Nope.  Not as far as I could tell.

The considerations of a power supply contributing to the headroom on an interface will be a choice made by a much more capable engineer than McQ at the interfaces design stage.

If he gets that bit wrong the card will be a turkey and no one would touch it, period.

I got what he was saying about the wall wart ... I think. :) It's a converter ... AC-DC (AD-DA) ... you're headroom is the amount of current it can handle before frying (Clipping). Or maybe I didn't get it and that's not the point he was making. *sHrUgS sHoUlDeRs* I took it as an analogy and I didn't take it as being condescending or anything like that.

Something must have happened that I missed that was personal, so I'll just shush up now. I hope everything gets worked out.

LOL, I'm still courteous to him, whether he makes sense or not.  Even if I think he's being a bull headed pig...

Mike is correct that higher rail voltages could restult in more headroom - but changing the wall wart from a 12V to a 24V will not necessarily change the rail voltage.  if the designer of the board has any resonable sense at all, it won't change the rail voltage because of regulators and diodes in the voltage cirucuit and it could possibly fry your board depending on how the voltage section of the board was designed.

I do not recommend that anyone try putting a 24V wallwart on an audio interface designed for 12V.

at least we can agree on that.

Doc_Hollingsworth


Rain which models are you looking at for Apogee and Focusrite?

Apogee Duet. 
Focusrite, I'm still not sure if I'd go w/ the Saffire or Scarlett.

Jonbouy

drewfx1




A few points:

In terms of things like digital amp sims (and also some synths), anytime you create distortion (or certain synth waveforms) you are creating high frequencies which will cause aliasing in digital. But for this reason in the modern world (where CPU power is abundant) any competent programmer upsamples their amp sim/synth plugins internally to avoid this problem. So it's not clear why running at higher rates is of any benefit for modern plugins (assuming whatever "quality" settings they have are set to their highest settings). If it was beneficial to upsample even more, the programmers just should have made an even higher quality setting available. Older plugins may or may not be a different story.

Hi Drew some knowledgeable, relevant good sense as usual.  Regarding the above point though did you read the article by Bootsy I linked which covers this particular subject from his view point?
 
   

Just read it.

There are basically 2 pieces of interest:

1. He argues that if a plugin upsamples, it has to do SRC's and starts talking about the artifacts/ringing/etc. that this introduces. While technically true, note that not only is there is no discussion of how audible this is in the real world, but he also talks about how good (more CPU intensive) offline SRC is in another paragraph. How bad does the SRC have to be for it to be audible? Or how many times do you have to repeat a better SRC before it becomes audible? What does it sound like? Is this stuff audible only for specific types of high level, high frequency test signals, or under more general circumstances?

IMHO, people who talk about artifacts without bothering to put the audibility in context are not helping anyone. In some cases it may encourage people to believe they hear stuff that isn't really audible (if it's even present). And prevents anyone from being able to make any sort of a reasoned judgment. I only care about artifacts I can hear, so don't just tell that they're there - tell me under what contexts they might be audible and what they sound like.


I do agree that computation wise, it makes sense to avoid unnecessary SRC's and the CPU costs involved, but keep in mind that if you run at a higher sample rate all of your processing is done at the higher rate, including all the linear processing that gets no benefits at a higher rate. Obviously it will also affect your disk usage and throughput as well.

Also note that for processing that produces lots of higher harmonics, just going up to 2x (i.e. 88.2 or 96k) will be insufficient, so the plugin would still have to oversample and you won't necessarily gain much CPU cost savings (you will move the plug's SRC artifacts higher though - which is a benefit if they were audible in the first place).

Whether doing repeated SRC's produces audible problems is an interesting question. It might or might not, depending on a number of factors. So in theory it might make sense to avoid this. But without doing carefully controlled double blind listening tests involving the specific SRC's in question, it's hard to say.

IOW, there may not be a single obvious best answer for all situations. 


But personally I have always argued that a DAW should allow you to set the sample rate at which individual or bins of plugins operate, as that way it could easily eliminate any redundant SRC's.


2. In terms of "filter coefficients", filter warping, IIR filters, etc., that was essentially the point I made about EQ curves changing. Minus all the melodramatics, of course. 

In terms of filter stability and the difficulty in achieving certain curves, it's again really just a question for the programmer. If you can't get what you want in a filter at a lower sampling rate, you just upsample as necessary.



So there's really a couple of distinct overall points here:

There are places it's clearly beneficial to do processing at a higher rate. Programmers can/should/will do this as necessary. Generally they sort of know what they are doing and do it. But older plugins (that were trying to save then more limited CPU) might not use a higher rate even if ideally they should.

and

What is the impact of repetitively doing SRC's at each plugin vs. running at a higher sampling rate throughout? How good is the SRC in each plug and how many times does my audio go through them? What are all the costs and benefits of doing this in different ways? Does one approach make sense universally, or does it depend on what you're doing? Are we making these decisions based on theoretical worst case scenarios (perhaps using carefully chosen high frequency test signals to bring out artifacts), or based on more typical real world audio? 

re: sample rate conversion:


http://src.infinitewave.ca/



"Are most SRCs really that bad?
No. If you look at the decibel scale to the right from the graphs, you can see that the range of these graphs is very wide: down to -180 dB. The distortions generated by most properly designed SRCs are below -100 dB and can hardly create audible artifacts. However SRCs differ in the transition band of the low-pass filter and in the amount of pre-/post-echo and aliasing. The bottom line is that most tested SRCs range from fairly good to excellent, but the graphs are very sensitive to emphasize the differences."

 I'd narrow down the list of brands that have great drivers for your OS. That is an over riding concern to me as I want to use the device at the lowest possible latency.

 That should get the number down to a very few choices.

 Use a good solid middle of the road mic, maybe a AKG 414 or a U87 and have a strong female singer belt a few tunes into the thing and see if you think there is much of a difference.

 Plug in a P-bass direct and see if it has any capability to sound more beautiful in the low register on one device or the other.

 If you test more than just the generic ichip stuff I think those two examples of use ought to convince you that there is a spectrum of good and better.
  
 
 best regards,
mike
 

 

mike_mccue


 I'd narrow down the list of brands that have great drivers for your OS. That is an over riding concern to me as I want to use the device at the lowest possible latency.

That should get the number down to a very few choices.

Use a good solid middle of the road mic, maybe a AKG 414 or a U87 and have a strong female singer belt a few tunes into the thing and see if you think there is much of a difference.

Plug in a P-bass direct and see if it has any capability to sound more beautiful in the low register on one device or the other.

If you test more than just the generic ichip stuff I think those two examples of use ought to convince you that there is a spectrum of good and better.
 

best regards,
mike

Can YOU tell a difference using any recognized listening testing method?
As I already said before mics, pres and input sources will make a more significant difference than converters (even taking into account any voltage requirements) in any modern interface.
 
Latency is a major concern if you have a major concern about latency.  5-6 ms is what I operate at (48 samples at 44,100 Hz) which scales well under moderate loads, that's on what is considered a budget interface these days, offering the portability of USB to boot.
 
If latency was more of an issue to me (I am currently able track through the app. without any concerns) I'd obviously run something off a PCIe slot rather than via USB 2.
 
Theres plenty of choice out there without any fear of landing yourself a turkey.  Sure some minor and perhaps inaudible differences could be obtained like Drew said for the price of a decent guitar, amp or mic, if you are that bothered by the minutae as you should be if you are running a commercial recording enterprise.
 
For mere mortals no so worried about the surface tension of a fart most reasonably priced interfaces these day will be more than merely adequate whatever outlets you have on your wall.
 
Would you agree?