Sorry it took a while to get back on this. I scanned your post, didn't see anything that I thought was dangerously wrong
, and put off replying. Then I threw a 3 day music festival at my house/studio and I'm kind of just getting back to the "real world".
Quote:
Originally Posted by 3buddhas
Maybe this is saying that both multiband compressors and pre/de emphasis methods are ways to use EQ to direct compressors?
|
Yeah. EQ in the sidechain does much the same thing. Each is different. In fact, they're only kind of the same if you squint, but yeah.
Quote:
...when a compressor squashes a peak, there's distortion.
|
I think what I was actually trying to say in the quote section is that
compressors (analog and emulations thereof, at least) distort. If the compression was perfect (like we can do in digital), it wouldn't sound like distortion to us. But physical components have physical limits. If nothing else, that "rail" I was talking about. No matter how much you ask it to put out, it can't give you more than it's power supply gives it. Most of the time it can't even really give you all of that. So it gives you what you can, and if that's not as much as you asked it for, it's going to sound like distortion. So the compression circuit inside that box is wrapped between a couple amplifiers, and is also an amplifier itself, and each of these have real output limits.
Quote:
Maybe distortion and saturation are the same thing?
|
Distortion, overdrive, saturation, breakup, crunch, fuzz... Everybody has a different definition of every one of them. What I mean is that there is some sample-to-sample non-linearity.
I tried to multiply sample a by x gain, and I got a * x
I tried with sample b which is bigger than sample a, and I got b * something less than x.
Quote:
what is "asymmetrical" saturation
|
Saturation that's not symmetrical
If the top of the waveform hits the limit before the bottom, or vice versa. People will tell you all kinds of things about even and odd harmonics, but we've had enough math for one post. In analog, the signal wiggles between and upper and a lower limit, and it is very often not exactly centered between them for one reason or another. People are used to hearing that sort of distortion, and it kind of is just a little more musical and interesting.
There's a bunch of these all through the signal path, and if you do it right you never really come near any of those limits unless you like the way it sounds when you do. The fun part is, though, that most "saturation curves" start rounding off at about -6db. That means that by the time you're half as loud as you can be, you're already not quite as loud as you should be.
Quote:
If the ones and zeros say sonic boom, Reaper's DAC will try to create a huge noise,
|
Reaper doesn't have a DAC. Your interface has a DAC. It has a physical limit as to how much voltage it can create. We don't care how many volts that is. All we need to know is that's all you get. We call that 0dbFS. Your interface (driver?) just doesn't even care about anything bigger than that. Reaper can conceive of numbers billions of times bigger than that, but whatever.
Quote:
with possible ugly results on playback systems that can't handle huge noises. Maybe no problem on playback systems that can handle them.
|
Every system will fail in a different way. Some are more pleasing than others.
Quote:
To avoid the worst case, upstream you try to avoid slamming the DAC with sonic boom commands. So you round off and limit. And try to use rounding/limiting tools that give consistent, desired results.
|
In order to be reasonably sure that we know how it fails, we fail before they do.
Quote:
And you seem to say, apply these even at the multitracks' individual track stage where needed to tame peaks. This last seems confirmed in next paragraph. And be conservative with the squashing on the individual project 2-busses.
|
We've said that a few times on this thread. If one thing sticks out a little too far at some point, we'd usually rather squash that one thing than just like everything.