‘Aphex exciter’ effect: the hidden “holy grail” of audiophilism?

[danadam]

There was a blind test some time ago on ASR that compared the output of a SET with a solid state amp. I can't remember the outcome of the test (maybe someone can link to it?)

Maybe this:

Take the blind challenge! 300B SET vs. Straight Wire with Gain

The challenge: How does a budget 300B SET compare to a "straight wire with gain"? You tell me. It's time to put your ears to the challenge. Poll is open for 14 days. No peeking at the results. Test Setup: I connected a Topping D90, set it at 0 dB volume, to a budget 300B single-ended...

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[Smaestro]

SMSL has some DACs that allow for Sound Color, and there are options for emulating actually scientificaly ideal tube amps, creating only perfect 2nd harmonics, no bad 3rd harmonics.

So if you wanted to, this option could beat a +100k tube amp easily, made possible by one single neat chip. But for me this sound color option, even if scientifically perfect, causes faster hearing fatigue.

3rd harmonics have their use. If you want more 'analog roundness', then yes, 2nd sounds better. If you want to excite something, such as the high end (cymbals) giving it more "spark" and "sizzle" or liven up a muffled choir, then it sounds better with both 2nd and 3rd harmonics.

Your post is I think a prime example for an idea I wanted to communicate: any produced song already has a very large amount of saturation on it, any more would be too much.

As an example, "Clean recorded vocals" have been going through the staple LA-2A leveling compressor right at tracking (before a mixing engineer get his hands on it). Measurements here suggest that adds around 3-4%THD during the rising stage (so going from uncompressed to compressed state)

LA-2A, THD rise with compression action

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Then when the mixing engineer gets his hands in it, they'll add a little saturation here, a little extra compression there. (Compression by definition adds saturation during the adjusting of levels, so during the attack and release movement) .

One of my compressors shows THD, and I'm not keeping track but if I had to guess I think clean tracks get about 0,1% at RMS levels and maybe an additional 1% at peaks. When we are talking about a vocal with a distinct modified sound, The Roots - The Seed 2.0 for example, it's at least double. The drums in that track sound to me like 5-8% THD from compression. In fact, that whole track sound super crunchy. They key sound of "Lonely Boy" by the White Keys is saturation, there's nothing on there remotely clean. While the drums sound relatively clean compared to the vocals, if the drums were actually clean, they would stand out like a sore thumb.

Cleaner genres like classical will have a lot less of this, but still some to aid the hearing of the listener (traceability of individual instruments). Edit: classical is often pretty compressed as the enormous dynamic range in auditoriums just doesn't make sense for living rooms.

The mastering engineer will then add little bits of saturation here and there to balance it all out, and will of course limit the track to get the loudness up to genre standard. Although mastering compressor/limiters, such as the Weiss DS3, are extremely transparent (they hide the saturation in auditory masked frequencies).

Point is, it makes sense that you find it tiring. The optimal amount of saturation has already painstakingly determined, any more is going to tip it over the edge. And that is for well engineered songs. Fast pop is overly crunchy, as it overly saturated gets more attention in the short run compared to clean or under saturated, and is thus even less accepting of even more distortion.

 

[Anton S]

If you like the effect of this or any other effect on your playback setup, then by all means use it and enjoy - the entire point of this hobby is to enjoy listening to music.

To the subject of the thread, though - is an exciter the "hidden holy grail of audiophilism" - the answer would have to be No because it doesn't restore anything or enhance fidelity; it's an additive effect. It's "creative" as you say. Nothing wrong with that of course - again, use one if you like its effects.

With that said, I've never felt the need or desire to add harmonics to the music I play on my system.

One interesting application of an exciter I've heard (and experimented with myself) is on bootleg recordings, specifically old 1970s Led Zeppelin soundboard recordings where the combination of the recording gear/technology of the time, possible azimuth misalignment, and generational loss from dubbing, result in an attenuated high end, and in some cases entirely missing harmonics for the high-hats/cymbals.

An exciter plug-in can add much-needed sparkle and harmonics to such recordings, and you could even argue that in such a case the exciter is a kind of forensic restoration tool that does potentially add to the fidelity - for example we know with 100% certainty that cymbals do have audible harmonics and we also know with 100% certainty that when those harmonics are missing from an old bootleg source, it's not about artistic intention.

The problem, though, is that the exciter plugin adds harmonics to everything. Even if you restrict the volume level and frequency range, it still adds harmonics to the entire sound at those frequencies and those volumes. So you get all kinds of added harmonic distortion of... existing harmonic distortion in the source. And it sounds awful and becomes super-fatiguing to listen to after a few minutes in my experience.

So for me - and this is just my personal experience and preference - the only recordings screwed up enough to need or benefit from an exciter are also screwed up in other ways that usually make an exciter do as much or more harm than good.

Now, an AI-based version of an exciter that could more accurately distinguish between music and distortion on an old source - that might be quite useful for certain very specific restoration projects.

My comment was meant to convey a general philosophical perspective to music playback, and wasn’t specifically focused on the Aphex unit. I long ago suffered through the “straight-wire-with-gain” approach to music reproduction and found it disappointing at best, primarily because, with very few exceptions, commercial music releases have been a hot mess for at least decades, and probably since the beginning of recorded music. My various listening disappointments have included, but not been limited to:

• Inconsistent tonal balance among different productions, with one sounding bright and the next sounding muffled; some with exaggerated bass and some with practically none
• Severely compressed dynamics, resulting in a “canned” music presentation
• Limited – if not completely missing – acoustic space, due to close-mic recording practices, which results in a 2-dimensional soundstage
• A completely lopped off bottom octave – sometimes both bottom octaves – robbing the music of its underpinnings

Unwilling to limit my music listening to a select few well-produced recordings, I began gradually transitioning my own system into a playback studio in order to do what I could to mitigate the above irritations, among others, and now have racks of specialized gear that enable me to address them. My current rig is about as far from a straight wire with gain as you could possibly imagine. Do I care? Hell no! Do I enjoy it completely? Hell yes! And, as you have said, that's the point of it all.

 

[tmtomh]

My comment was meant to convey a general philosophical perspective to music playback, and wasn’t specifically focused on the Aphex unit. I long ago suffered through the “straight-wire-with-gain” approach to music reproduction and found it disappointing at best, primarily because, with very few exceptions, commercial music releases have been a hot mess for at least decades, and probably since the beginning of recorded music. My various listening disappointments have included, but not been limited to:

• Inconsistent tonal balance among different productions, with one sounding bright and the next sounding muffled; some with exaggerated bass and some with practically none
• Severely compressed dynamics, resulting in a “canned” music presentation
• Limited – if not completely missing – acoustic space, due to close-mic recording practices, which results in a 2-dimensional soundstage
• A completely lopped off bottom octave – sometimes both bottom octaves – robbing the music of its underpinnings

Unwilling to limit my music listening to a select few well-produced recordings, I began gradually transitioning my own system into a playback studio in order to do what I could to mitigate the above irritations, among others, and now have racks of specialized gear that enable me to address them. My current rig is about as far from a straight wire with gain as you could possibly imagine. Do I care? Hell no! Do I enjoy it completely? Hell yes! And, as you have said, that's the point of it all.

This all makes sense - and regarding the rock bootlegs I mentioned, I'm active on a couple forums where folks do exactly as you say when the listen to these: they treat them as "dry," not-final sources (which bootlegs recorded off the soundboard are, because they are EQ'd to compensate for the venue's acoustics and because they often lack some of the final processing that would have been applied before the sound came out of the venue PA). Accordingly, they run them through reverb units and other processing gear. Occasionally they record the results and share them as fan remasters of the original source. Some of them sound terrible, but some are definitely improvements over the raw soundboard.

As for the more general practice of applying processing to the playback of recorded music, indeed, do whatever pleases you! At the philosophical level, I would only say that in my view it's best to approach this using multiple available affects or tweaks that one can switch in and out of the chain on a recording-by-recording basis. As you know, some folks prefer to "bake in" certain effects via sonically colored core components in their systems. Again, all good if that's what they enjoy - but IMHO not the best approach conceptually given how variable recordings can be in their sonic character.

 

[elvisizer]

View attachment 357960

Yup.

 

[radix]

We used to have an aural exciter in our radio station's production booth (not the on-air) back in the 80s-90s. It got used for some voice over and station IDs and clips and such. As with many things, a little can be interesting, a lot is over-the-top. Maybe it was the autotune of the day? As a college station, we were not really pushing to compressor/fm exciter (different thing) very hard.

 

[Brent71]

From The Eagles - The Long Run album: "this album was NOT mixed using the Aphex Aural Exciter"