What I didn't understand from Lill's video is the part where he measures the Neve distortion/unity gain kind of thing.
Correct me if I'm wrong here:
From the curves that I see, the Neve seems to be linear until it reaches a flat point, a typical hard-clipping situation, which could also be described as a protection clipper: "I will clip anything above that or else I'll die."
Then he uses that linear-to-flat line to code a 3-line digital equivalent to "solidify" his argument by overly simplifying saturation curves into inf:1 hard knees. So he does code a 3-line hard clipper, and guess what, it sounds the same. I feel like all that was a stunt to build on a shaky argument. Who would believe that a digital hard clipper sounds vastly different from an analog one?
Using his measurements, we see that the Neve is linear up to ~25 V, which would greatly surpass the ~13 V a converter can accept (again, anything above that is just hard clipping/protection). So he kind of structures his argument around this easily reproducible hard-clipping/protection situation.
My question is: are all preamps linear until they flatten out and hard clip? Because even if the amps had a pad or an output knob to lower the final output, the hard knee is still there. Aren't there more mellow S-curves/softer knees before reaching the flat line, which have different sweet spots ("character")?
If we have to assume that we don't have clippers with softer knees and everything is a hard-kneed Z clipper (maybe even talking about line amps here), we are kind of stripped of the tools we have to control dynamic range. Compressors suck at controlling dynamic range. They sound like garbage, and when you try to contain peaks as fast as you can, they click. Whoever has touched an analog compressor knows that, unless you delay the input and make it act with lookahead, or maybe compress reverse signals. They are OK when attacks are open, and they can bring the RMS closer to the peaks, but that's about it, and it's not always what's needed. That's why some people clip before they compress, to feed the compressor an easier signal. Generally, in my opinion, it's much more pleasant to listen to clipper/saturator artifacts than compressors working, pumping, or clicking.
Moreover, I think Jim Lill is a bit of a Nashville-tunnel-vision kind of guy. That's proven by his all-new channel, "What X Really Sounds Like," where X is a band or something. The first episode I saw was about Metallica... I mean... He starts by saying, "I know a lot about 1–2 genres and close to nothing about many genres," and it kind of shows.
He states that distorting the signal on the input is an "anomaly." Well, maybe in Nashville it is, but we have a whole '90s techno/rave scene that crunched everything (909s, 808s, 303s, chords, whatever) through cheap Mackie consoles and Portastudios, and people still sweat listening to these tracks played on huge sound systems. What about reggae/dub? Lee Perry? King Tubby? Clearly audible distortion pretty much everywhere. One minute into Scientist - The Best Dub Album In The World, you can hear a synth distorting all the way through, and that's the '80s.
Generally, I appreciate Lill's video, but I feel that this part should be stated as an assumption. Assumptions happen everywhere in scientific work; they are a tool to help us continue our work and reach a later stage by taking something for granted, but they do reduce the strength of the thesis. I feel like he structured this part very carefully, almost to the point of manipulation, so his argument wouldn't lose credibility. Maybe he was just too deep into his work and had to somehow get around that.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong.
