Karyn


 The thing that I don't understand is that back in 'the day' audio gear companies spent millions trying to make their products as good and perfect as possible.  From the early days of hot valves, through noisy transistors to high tech analogue ICs, the ultimate aim was to make the product as perfect as possible.  The more money that was spent, the closer to perfection you got.

bunnyfluffer


if you want "character" slap one of these on the master buss and be done with it!

http://www.thermionicculture.com/products/culture_vulture.htm

Jose7822


Yeah, I can't wait to try Juice.  I've tried their Decapitator plugin on a Drum Bus and REALLY liked what it did to it.  I'm actually thinking about buying their Native bundle, but the little GUI quirks (which are really not showstopper, but can get annoying) are holding me back.  I called them up to report these bugs and they told me that an update was under way and scheduled to be released in the coming weeks.  We'll see.  But other than that, I'm really liking their products.  They are very original stuff, and sound goooood!

Take care!

yorolpal

Jose7822


Yeah, I can't wait to try Juice.  I've tried their Decapitator plugin on a Drum Bus and REALLY liked what it did to it.  I'm actually thinking about buying their Native bundle, but the little GUI quirks (which are really not showstopper, but can get annoying) are holding me back.  I called them up to report these bugs and they told me that an update was under way and scheduled to be released in the coming weeks.  We'll see.  But other than that, I'm really liking their products.  They are very original stuff, and sound goooood!

Take care!

Yea, I wrote and got an email from Mitch at SoundToys also saying that they were working on porting to 64bit and it was "just a few weeks away" ....waaaaay more than a few weeks ago.  I check their site quite often but so far, no love.  I really like their plugins and hope they get sorted soon.  I've got the Native Bundle and it is indeed KILLER DILLER!

I don't wish to speak for John but I think he actually meant the latter. I think he is speaking more about the distortion in the recordings themselves and not the individual, purposeful distortions that (like AT refered to above) almost evey musician in one way or another applies to his or her sound. But best let John speak for himself here. Sorry for nosing in.

Karyn

DonaldDuck


It's a common problem with in the box mixes that the "rendered" file doesn't sound exactly like the playback while mixing the tracks.  There are many reasons for this.  However, with analog mixing, what I hear while mixing is EXACTLY what it sounds like when I mix down to my stereo mix. 
 
But, alas, it is all subjective. 

Actually there is just one reason for this, and it can be turned off.  It's down to the quality settings in the synths/sample players/FX you are using.  To get real time playback on low spec systems (read pre-i7/i5) most modules have a low/high quality switch to cut down on CPU/RAM use.  Guitar Rig has a High Q switch in the top of the gui, BFD has a setting in prefferences that limits the range of samples used for real time tracking, even Audio Snap and V-Vocal use quick renders for tracking/mixing and then produce a high quality version for the final off-line render, this is the extra processing steps you often see when producing a final render.
 
If your machine is powerfull enough you can run everything at high quality all the time. If your machine can't handle that, then you can still bounce tracks to audio at high quality and use those.  Your final render will sound exactly the same as your mix.
 
If you're mixing in analogue by sending stems out from Sonar using multiple outputs then what you're hearing is the low quality versions intended for real time listening, unless you manualy set everything to high Q as above.
 
As for "pure" analogue mixing, you will never ever get what you hear recorded to your master tape/dat/cd/hdd.
The output from the summing amps in your mixer get split between the monitor send (another amp) and the line out to tape (another amp), so the signal going to your monitors is NOT what you are recording to Master. Then when you play back the signal first goes through yet another set of amps (the output stage of your tape/cd/dat machine and the input amp of your desk) before going to your monitors. So it can NEVER sound the same as you heard while mixing.
 
Mixing in the box (assuming High Q settings as above) the output data stream is sent to your audio card for monitoring and THE SAME data stream gets saved to disk as your master file.
When playing back the master file, the SAME DATA STREAM is sent to the SAME SOUND CARD with no extra processing and thus you hear exatly what you recorded.

Karyn


ok, I'll bite...  What limitations are we talking about here? 64bit sampling @1024k samples not good enough?

At the end of the day, what you're hearing when you mix "in the box" is the same data stream that gets recorded and is the same data stream that you then hear on playback. It sounds and is the same whatever math system you use.