SOUND LIAISON, PCM DXD DSD free compare formats sampler. A new 2.0 version.

[Sound Liaison]

Sorry to say but i doubt the explanation of the “fix” as sessions are automated. It is very likely they simply put an Eq on the vocals to filter out the noise. I am doing a lit of mixing
for film an documentaries and asa rule of thumb, voices can be filtered above 15khz an below 200 (female) and 100 (male). Not High end though, but already unnoticeable...

Hi Herbert
I guess that would be possible, your solution would have saved me a day of work except then it would no longer be up to our standard and I believe the sound would suffer.

 

[Sound Liaison]

RayDunzl
Might have a point when he jokingly said; “Probably electrical interference with all the pacemakers installed in the audience.” Or maybe hearing aids as I recall we did have a bit older audience in the hall for that concert.
For the digital release only the extra vocal mic track went through the analogue equipment and then back to the workstation.
The digital workstation was placed on the floor right next to the musicians so there we had a very short cable length.

 

[Sound Liaison]

There is no album. The product is not physical. You download a file. If you re-download the file the new version of it should arrive. If in doubt ask your seller.

Hi SarumBear
There is a Redbook CD as well as Wav and mp3 downloads available at CARMEN GOMES BANDCAMP.COM

 

[Sound Liaison]

If I'm not mistaken they only fixed one song of the 'downloadable album', available as a sampler. So first question is if they plan to redo everything.

Hi Geert
So far we have only changed the vocal track on the free sampler.
I understand that this track should be as clean as possible since it is being widely used for testing.
We will hope to make a new mix for the album during the summer that we will then place next to the original on the Sound Liaison page.
Customers who have bought the original will get a free download of the updated “digital” version if they wish.
The original version has received a great deal of praise for the way it sounds and several speaker manufacturers are using it to demo speakers so I have to take my time and not rush the process when mixing the digital vocal track in order to get it as close to the original sound as possible.

 

[Sound Liaison]

If the rest of this album is also affected from this mistake I"d have expected they to fix it as well.

Hi Nango
I copy and paste the answer from above.

So far we have only changed the vocal track on the free sampler.
I understand that this track should be as clean as possible since it is being widely used for testing.
We will hope to make a new mix for the album during the summer that we will then place next to the original on the Sound Liaison page.
Customers who have bought the original will get a free download of the updated “digital” version if they wish.
The original version has received a great deal of praise for the way it sounds and several speaker manufacturers are using it to demo speakers so I have to take my time and not rush the process when mixing the digital vocal track in order to get it as close to the original sound as possible.

 

[Sound Liaison]

What does this mean for the full album release?

Hi Mansr
see the answer above.
greetings Frans

 

[Geert]

Hi Geert
We will hope to make a new mix for the album during the summer that we will then place next to the original on the Sound Liaison page. Customers who have bought the original will get a free download of the updated “digital” version if they wish.
The original version has received a great deal of praise for the way it sounds.. .

Thanks for the update. And I have the album and use it as one of my references.

 

[Herbert]

Hi Herbert
I guess that would be possible, your solution would have saved me a day of work except then it would no longer be up to our standard and I believe the sound would suffer.

Thank you very much for your answer.
Could you please explain why the vocal track would suffer if you had applied a lowpass filter
that cuts the vocals above 30kHz? Because if I remember the video correctly, there was no garbage
below - I must guess here because it was not easy to see in the video - let´s say 33kHz or 34kHz.
Which Tools did you use to recreate the vintage analog equipment and how?
Best, Herbert

 

[Nango]

Thanks for the update. And I have the album and use it as one of my references.

Indeed, me too. Great album btw. actually not only for reference purposes.

 

[Sound Liaison]

Thank you very much for your answer.
Could you please explain why the vocal track would suffer if you had applied a lowpass filter
that cuts the vocals above 30kHz? Because if I remember the video correctly, there was no garbage
below - I must guess here because it was not easy to see in the video - let´s say 33kHz or 34kHz.
Which Tools did you use to recreate the vintage analog equipment and how?
Best, Herbert

Hi Herbert
Sure we could have used a low pass filter on the vocal track. But because we also had access to the original 'digital' track (which was clean), we opted for this. If there is a distortion in a very high frequency it might be generated in a lower audible frequency but there you might not notice it as it is masked by the other sources.
We have tried various plugins in the digital domain. In the end, we opted for a combination of ever so slight compression with Fabfilter C2 and Steinberg’s tape simulator.
I understand you are an engineer as well and would be curious as to which version you think sounds the best, the original with the “garbage” in the higher frequencies or the pure digital.
Greetings Frans

 

[Sound Liaison]

One more thing comes to mind;
I am always in doubt whether to use analogue gear in some part of the signal chain or just go the easy way and use some of the surprisingly good plugins that are available nowadays.
I grew up as an engineer in the analogue century and I wonder how much is sentiment and how much is truth as to what sounds best.
Dirk Overeem, engineer from the Metropole Orchestra who resides here in the same building, keeps telling us that we have to borrow their big original EMT140 plate reverb, as he thinks it would be perfect for part 2 of the Carmen Gomes Inc.’s Discovering the music of Robert Johnson that we are working on at the moment. He claims that the sound is better with more depth and liveliness than the highly acclaimed Altiverb digital copy.
But what if the tradeoff is digital noise? Would you choose a slight improvement in sound or would you prefer a nice clean beautiful signal path as we have now on the 2.0 free compare formats sampler?
Your thoughts on this are most welcome.
greetings Frans

 

[danadam]

But what if the tradeoff is digital noise? Would you choose a slight improvement in sound or would you prefer a nice clean beautiful signal path as we have now on the 2.0 free compare formats sampler?

As I don't think highres has any merit on the playback side, I would take the improved sound and convert it to 44.1 kHz, which would get rid of the supersonic noise by getting rid of supersonic everything. Best of both worlds

 

[Herbert]

I understand you are an engineer as well and would be curious as to which version you think sounds the best, the original with the “garbage” in the higher frequencies or the pure digital.

Thanks for the explanation! There could be a trick to find out,
assuming both vocal tracks analog chain and digital chain are in sync down to the sample.
Invert one, mix both down, maybe the noise gets isolated enough to see what has happened.
Best, Herbert

 

[amirm]

But what if the tradeoff is digital noise?

I think an analog transform is fine as long as the equipment is not generating unintended and not useful spectrum. Ultrasonic noise for example can't have any value. Neither does random tones here and there. I would test for these things and if it passes, then what it does is fine if the talent/producer/engineer like the sound of analog gear.

 

[psemeraro]

First of all the noise starts way over the human voice,
If I remember the video correctly the first peak was about 30kHz, maybe more.
Way, way over the human voice - and it´s overtones (if any) get "buried" by the overtones of
the backing instruments anyway.
No harm done cutting the singers track gently above let´s say 24 kHz
-except in the eyes(not ears) of "audiophiles". Time to tell porky pies.
We should not forget that in all of Amirs High-Res review overtones are extremely low.
In this recording and other, -100db is safe to say isn't it?
Second they liked the "warmth" of the analog capture file but a good analogue chain
should not add any warmth - if you can detect it by ear, check the chain.

Screenshots of the sessions would show, if they are telling porky pies.
But this is high end, and audiosciencereview has already revealed many porky pies, so...?

As you are someone who works in ProTools, then you know full-well that "warmth" is a little more complicated than how you are describing it. "Warmth" from vintage gear does not automatically mean mud... but rather a combination of harmonics/noise and other artifacts, often in the midrange area (along with possibly a softening of the treble range) that "can" in the right hands add a sense of body or subtle color to the vocal track that a producer might find artistically pleasing. You know that final vocal sound is artist + room + mic + preamp + console + whatever processing is used along the way both in tracking and mixing.

Vintage analog gear with limited audio response can still pass along very high frequency noise from an oscilating opamp, or failing tube. Some vintage analog gear is transformer coupled which would limit the output bandwidth (or not depending on the specific transformer and how it is terminated by the next component in the chain) but some of it is not. As a studio person you know full well that the lead vocal on a track like this on mixdown might have a chain that looks something like tape machine to console, out of console to EQ, then compressor, likely another eq post compression and whatever else the producer decided to use. Any one of those components could be the cause of the high frequency noise.

The important thing is the track has been fixed. It seems more valuable to celebrate that vs second guess the honesty of the producer.

 

[Herbert]

Dear psemeraro,
nothing new to me. My latest documentary was intentionally recorded almost entirely with a vintage phantom powered Sennheiser MKH416 attached to a mono SIE232 field mixer from around 1978. The defunct SIE competed the SQN3. I knew the film would be black and white so I wanted to add a subtle analog sound world. I could have plugged the Sennheiser microphone directly into the digital camera that provided phantom power as well (and lower hiss) but did not have the sound signature of the mixer. And avoided modern microphones even when they were easier to carry. Same with mixing. No modern denoising to remove unwanted noise, just classical filtering with EQ. But plugins only.

 

[LightBit]

But because we also had access to the original 'digital' track (which was clean), we opted for this.

I would be really interested to hear it with raw track without processing (compression/tape).
Maybe a bit too much to ask.

 

[Sound Liaison]

Hi LightBit,
That would be a good idea for a future compare sampler. We could have one song without any treatment at all and one with the actual mix/mastering.
I'll take it into consideration.
thanks and greetings
Frans

 

[MWC]

@Sound Liason Dear Frans, I love your recordings and huge kudos on taking on board Amir's fault finding and looking for a solution. Seems you found a great way to fix it, even at the expense of a day's work. Man I'm so pleased to hear of someone in your position taking customer response so seriously and putting love of the music and audio fidelity first.

 

[danadam]

Man I'm so pleased to hear of someone in your position taking customer response so seriously and putting love of the music and audio fidelity first.

Personally I'd prefer he spent his time producing new albums rather than fixing non-audible issues in old ones.

@Sound Liaison on the topic of non-audible issues, there are some tracks that have kind of a beep at around 21 kHz. Just out of curiosity, do you know what it is? (And to be clear, I do not ask to fix that in existing albums; on the contrary, I ask to not waste time on it)
Examples:
Andre Heuvelman / Crystal Tears / 02 Negue

Paul Berner Band / This Bird Has Flown / 04 It's Only Love

Witmer Trio / Free / 06 Feel Like Makin' Love

Odelion / Northern Lights / 01 Forgiveness