Why "audiophiles" don't use VSTs?

[Sokel]

I may be a little cruel here,but the production process is no fun.People get payed for it.
They get payed following the chain of what I use to have fun and I except them to deliver.
If they don't I go to the next that has done the job right.

Even if I like scrutinizing things,the first goal is fun,second goal to be true to recording as much as I can.
I pay for this you know,I do not inted to do someone else job even if I have studied the subject as much as they do.
Of course being a hobbyist and try to do the same with partial information because random guys said so in the internet is a joke,right?

 

[LouB]

Like I said in my post somewhere on the first page, objectivists and subjectivists don't use VST for the same reason - both are purists. I think that having "fidelity to the recording" is a misguided approach, as @Londek argues very well. And as I said early, mastering engineers are "subjective objectivists" - they might use objective methods, but the sound they produce is entirely subjective and to their taste. And not to mention, on their studio monitors (some of which were horribly flawed like the BBC LS3/5A). They don't know what YOUR taste is, let alone what kind of coloration your speakers, room, and electronics might introduce. So I think the real goal should be "fidelity to the performance", and the only way to get there is to be a "subjective objectivist" yourself. Use objective methods, but tune the sound to your subjective taste. And the best way to do that is to use the same tools the mastering engineers use ... VST.

I didn't assemble my system to re-create square waves or perfect impulse responses, although it can certainly come close with all the DSP I have in it. It is there to listen to music, and if I have more tools at my disposal then all the better. DSP for driver and room correction is not controversial on ASR. But somehow going the extra step and using the same tools the recording engineers use is controversial. After all, both are a form of digital manipulation.

If you want to have "fidelity to the recording" and ignore all the subjective fiddling that the recording engineer performed, regardless of whether it might be detrimental to the sound ... then yeah, go ahead. Your music, your system, so you can decide

Not really, when you use VST/EQ on a prerecorded 2 track mix you only have control over the sound that's already been mastered. A mastered 2 track processed mix can certainly be tweaked to change how it sounds for better or worse. But just because you have may have the" same tools" as the studio that mastered the recording your not doing anything to the recording that an actual sound engineer would do prior to releasing the recording. In other words after something has been mastered you can only add processing to it. One can argue the more processing you add to a recording the farther you get from fidelty. If that's what you like to too do than as you said "your music, your system than yeah go ahead". Also you give way to much credit/blame to a mastering engineer, if you think an recording artist spends days/weeks/months sometimes years recording an album and leaves the final mix/master up to some engineer that usually doesn't happen in today's world.

 

[dorakeg]

Why do you want to get as close to the recording as possible? Don't you want to get as close to the performance as possible?

That's my point, I don't necessarily believe that mastering engineers know what's best for you. I have enough bad recordings in my collection to know that.

How do you measure if a recording is close to actual performance or not?? Other than people who were present in the studio during the recording, no one else have heard the actual performance.

So, my question is that without a reference to compare with, how do you tell if a recording is close to the actual performance?

 

[dorakeg]

Why do you want to get as close to the recording as possible? Don't you want to get as close to the performance as possible?

That's my point, I don't necessarily believe that mastering engineers know what's best for you. I have enough bad recordings in my collection to know that.

How do you measure if a recording is close to actual performance or not?? Other than people who were present in the studio during the recording, no one else have heard the actual performance.

So, my question is that without a reference to compare with, how do you tell if a recording is close to the actual performance?

 

[dorakeg]

"but they do alter the sound" - Yeah sure, but it's imprecise as hell! "Reverb", "Treble", "Bass" are very general terms.
What reverb, how does the virtual room look like? What is the decay time?
What is treble? >3khz? >4khz? It is 1khz difference and its totally noticeable, 3khz - 4khz is zone where technically much of "harshiness" happens.
What is bass? For who? Classic music people can say its 100-200hz-ish zone, electronic music people are gonna get closer to sub-bass zone.

For your questions, you should ask the equipment manufacturer instead. Just to add that guitar amps has more controls and some of them I have no idea what they are.. controls like speed, presence, intensity, dwell etc...

 

[FINFET]

I really like this topic. I've found that using VSTs can significantly enhance my listening experience sometimes. I particularly enjoy using VSTs for analog device emulation (different kinds of tubes, etc.) and dynamic EQ or some mastering plugins from ozone to improve separation and loudness. One of my favorite VSTs is the Waves Abbey Road Studio which does a decent job of simulating the experience of listening to a track in a professional studio with high-end monitors.

If you're a PC gamer, you know the feeling of play games with mods (smaller one that change some game mechanics or graphics, not bigger ones that provide entirely new experiences). It's like adding new flavors to a game you've already played multiple times so you can get some fresh air. The same goes for listening to music with VSTs – you can always find something new and exciting with your own "mods" added to the track. However, I do recommend using VSTs only on tracks that you are already familiar with, just as it's better to play a game as its creators intended at least once before modifying it to your liking. To faithfully and transparently deliver artists original creation intend is of course very important. Even if you don't like the original performance or mastering, that'll help to build some common sense on an album and artist so you'll know what the community are talking about.

 

[Waxx]

Like I said in my post somewhere on the first page, objectivists and subjectivists don't use VST for the same reason - both are purists. I think that having "fidelity to the recording" is a misguided approach, as @Londek argues very well. And as I said early, mastering engineers are "subjective objectivists" - they might use objective methods, but the sound they produce is entirely subjective and to their taste. And not to mention, on their studio monitors (some of which were horribly flawed like the BBC LS3/5A). They don't know what YOUR taste is, let alone what kind of coloration your speakers, room, and electronics might introduce. So I think the real goal should be "fidelity to the performance", and the only way to get there is to be a "subjective objectivist" yourself. Use objective methods, but tune the sound to your subjective taste. And the best way to do that is to use the same tools the mastering engineers use ... VST.

I didn't assemble my system to re-create square waves or perfect impulse responses, although it can certainly come close with all the DSP I have in it. It is there to listen to music, and if I have more tools at my disposal then all the better. DSP for driver and room correction is not controversial on ASR. But somehow going the extra step and using the same tools the recording engineers use is controversial. After all, both are a form of digital manipulation.

If you want to have "fidelity to the recording" and ignore all the subjective fiddling that the recording engineer performed, regardless of whether it might be detrimental to the sound ... then yeah, go ahead. Your music, your system, so you can decide

I don't think you know what a mastering engineer and his job is. Most of what you say is done by the mixing engineer.

A mastering engineer's most important job is to prepare the audio technically for the final format, the one that the consumer will receive. Mastering is a form of audio post production, but a technical one, not artistic. It's the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage medium (the master), the source from which all copies will be produced (via methods such as pressing, duplication or replication). Mastering is not choosing how it sounds like many think, that is the job of the producer and the mixing engineer. The mastering engineer may use eq and compressing/limiting for that when need, but it's subtile and on a good mix you won't hear much difference after the mastering.

 

[w00b3r]

I am leaning towards the idea that many of us in this thread are perceiving the term "audiophile" in different ways, so I will elaborate on a couple points.

1. Trying to reproduce the original performance - none of us were there; thus you are still just chasing the idea of a good sounding performance. VSTs can help with that. They can't be the whole solution, but rather a piece to the puzzle.

2. minimizing distortion - this topic is touchy. i have seen many audiophiles who talk about this subject, yet use tone controls, and favor medium SINAD equipment and low efficiency speakers, in untreated rooms.
... and VSTs can help in BOTH directions. VSTs have 64bit floating point precision, and they do not transcode the output by nature. They also have self-aware delay compensation, which can help reduce jitter. Those that allow oversampling will operate at samplerates higher than your DAC can even accept, before being passed to the DAC itself.

As already discussed, they can be used to add distortion aswell. Think about it this way - if you wanted to boost the bass in a performance, would you rather use tone controls on your aftermarket equipment, or tone controls that are modeled after the very same equipment used to record that performance?

personally I don't recommend more than an EQ and some distortion plugins. a multiband dynamic eq if you are feeling adventurous.

once you dig into limiters and clippers, and recompressing the whole track, you are diving into remastering territory IMO.

 

[Trell]

Think about it this way - if you wanted to boost the bass in a performance, would you rather use tone controls on your aftermarket equipment, or tone controls that are modeled after the very same equipment used to record that performance?

How do you know which equipment and software was used as well as how?

Tone controls are not created equal, that’s for sure, but the RME ADI-2 tone controls are quite configurable. Works well for me.

 

[Multicore]

A mastering engineer's most important job is to prepare the audio technically for the final format, the one that the consumer will receive. Mastering is a form of audio post production, but a technical one, not artistic. It's the process of preparing and transferring recorded audio from a source containing the final mix to a data storage medium (the master), the source from which all copies will be produced (via methods such as pressing, duplication or replication). Mastering is not choosing how it sounds like many think, that is the job of the producer and the mixing engineer. The mastering engineer may use eq and compressing/limiting for that when need, but it's subtile and on a good mix you won't hear much difference after the mastering.

That wasn't exactly my experience. Oktopus tracked and mixed our second album and gave us a CD-R with 2-ch 16-bit and warned us that it isn't finished. It needs mastering. Iiuc, he was setting our expectation that if we listen to his mixes with no further processing we will likely be disappointed. He gave us a clean mix with all the dynamics available given the performances we had recorded. It was now up to us working with a mastering engineer for each release format we choose to make a whole bunch important aesthetic/technical choices to do with loudness warfare, warmth of vinyl, loudness balance across the songs, who knows what.

He was right to warn us. When the label that had agreed to publish it as an LP backed out and we decided to make our own CD, the files Oktopus gave us did sound kinda thin. I don't recall what we did about that, if anything, but eventually everything worked out fine and I am very proud of the result.

But your last sentence just doesn't correspond to my experience. I think Oktopus did a good job with the mixing and part of that job was knowing what wasn't his job and leaving space for big aesthetic decisions to be made in mastering.

 

[Multicore]

An error in mixing that I often correct for in playback can be done with a VST or a number of other technical implementations, including, if you are lucky enough to have one: the MONO button.

 

[Geert]

An error in mixing that I often correct for in playback can be done with a VST or a number of other technical implementations, including, if you are lucky enough to have one: the MONO button.

You mean stereo is an error?

 

[Multicore]

You mean stereo is an error?

I mean stereo mixes can be so bad that I think it's better to remix to mono for listening.

 

[w00b3r]

How do you know which equipment and software was used as well as how?

Tone controls are not created equal, that’s for sure, but the RME ADI-2 tone controls are quite configurable. Works well for me.

You most likely don't, but there are EQs modeled after virtually every popular brand of analog studio EQs going back to the 1950s.
Your RME is considered by some pros as a piece of "outboard gear", it essentially has DSP (aka its own version of VSTs) built into it. VSTs are a way of adding the studio level DSP aspect without changing gear.

So in other words, you are using an EQ modeled after a peice of gear, with a flavor of sound that is shared across many popular songs. And even if they didnt use these hardware EQs in recording, they likely used similar brands of console in the tracking process; Example SSL, Mackie, Pultec, which use similar parts in circuitry to their EQ brethren.

The RME has the same idea.. make the changes in the digital realm to each sample, before analog conversion.

To sum things up, VSTs speak the same language as your DAC. They take audio samples from your digital files, apply DSP to them, and offer benefits such as endless variety and expandability, possible pre-DAC jitter correction, and oversampling to decrease aliasing distortion. They also output raw audio samples, and are built with things like ASIO in mind. since they are often used in DAWs that output to pro level audio interfaces that have DACs and ADCs in them. VSTs are meant to be the last thing that touches audio in a DAW before going into the DAC of outboard gear. So if your DAC lacks a certain functionality, VSTs can be used to ADD functionality to your DAC without changing your DAC. At the cost of processing power, of course.

 

[markanini]

The best use of a VST IMO is a volume matching plugin. It removes volume biases when EQing for reproduction, a pretty big deal and you wont EQ the same again, I guarantee it.

 

[HarmonicTHD]

... I just came accross this one .... for those wanting to get the "vinyl" feel without spending the money, effort and what have you ... it is free too, so no downside really (64bit VST, so you need "player" which supports this, most DAWs do though) . I like the adjustments for Dust, Scratch and Warp .....

Vinyl Plugin—Free Lofi Plug-in | iZotope

iZotope's Vinyl plug-in is the ultimate LoFi effect for vintage audio vibes. Download for Free today!

www.izotope.com

 

[w00b3r]

The best use of a VST IMO is a volume matching plugin. It removes volume biases when EQing for reproduction, a pretty big deal and you wont EQ the same again, I guarantee it.

there is also something made by company Ayaic called the "hyper EQ" Ceilings of Sound. It uses the idea of noise slopes to help you shape your "final curve" of the overall sound. VERY underrated potential.

 

[Deleted member 58722]

I really like this topic. I've found that using VSTs can significantly enhance my listening experience sometimes. I particularly enjoy using VSTs for analog device emulation (different kinds of tubes, etc.) and dynamic EQ or some mastering plugins from ozone to improve separation and loudness. One of my favorite VSTs is the Waves Abbey Road Studio which does a decent job of simulating the experience of listening to a track in a professional studio with high-end monitors.

If you're a PC gamer, you know the feeling of play games with mods (smaller one that change some game mechanics or graphics, not bigger ones that provide entirely new experiences). It's like adding new flavors to a game you've already played multiple times so you can get some fresh air. The same goes for listening to music with VSTs – you can always find something new and exciting with your own "mods" added to the track. However, I do recommend using VSTs only on tracks that you are already familiar with, just as it's better to play a game as its creators intended at least once before modifying it to your liking. To faithfully and transparently deliver artists original creation intend is of course very important. Even if you don't like the original performance or mastering, that'll help to build some common sense on an album and artist so you'll know what the community are talking about.

"One of my favorite VSTs is the Waves Abbey Road Studio which does a decent job of simulating the experience of listening to a track in a professional studio with high-end monitors."

Through headphones only. If you forget to disengage the plugin when playing through speakers it sounds wrong. It's the only plugin I use.

 

[EJ3]

Why "audiophiles" don't use VSTs? Concept is pretty clear - you would get objectively saying the most precise amp, speaker - entire audio rig - and then colorize signal digitally at source (well, you could route analog signal to the actual analog rig, but plugins mimic analog rigs so well already), add up some distortion (Ozone Pro Exciter, Fabfilter Saturn etc), EQ (Pro-Q etc).

I've been observing the audiophile community for a pretty long time now and I've noticed all conversations come down to one thing:
People just don't like the mix, it's literally that simple, either song is actually poorly mixed or people just don't enjoy the tonality that audio engineer offered them.
Also why don't we have DSP's with support for VSTs? (I don't know any, if you know one, let me know)

Maybe money is the issue as always? Amp can be sold for 5k USD, typical plugin goes for <500 USD (and that's most often the price of entire bundle!), so it might not be worth it for audiophile companies to change the mindset behind the "audio quality"

Or maybe, I don't like to put it this way, but maybe audiophiles are just too dumb and they think measured gear distortion is different from the same but digitally applied one? (Same thing goes for EQs etc)

Is a VST?

Virtual Studio Technology?​

 

[FINFET]

"One of my favorite VSTs is the Waves Abbey Road Studio which does a decent job of simulating the experience of listening to a track in a professional studio with high-end monitors."

Through headphones only. If you forget to disengage the plugin when playing through speakers it sounds wrong. It's the only plugin I use.

Yeah you are right, headphones only. By the text I mean simulating the experience of listening to a track in a [professional-studio-with-high-end-monitors] (through headphones).