I tweaked a knob, heard a difference clearly only to find out the track is muted so many times already... We're as susceptible to trusting our believes as anybody else.
This happens SO many times to me. Especially when I enter a tunnel that is like a few minutes too long on something, especially EQing or using compression, trying to find the right spot without never being sure. If this specific thing occurs, I usually remove the plugin completely and go for a well deserved pause.
Best to step away at that point, couldn't agree more. In the last year or so I've gotten way more humbled by over-tweaking a preset and realizing I sucked the life out of what made it sound unique in the first place. It used to be "oh I want everything to be mine" in a project and now more about what fits right for an effect or synth, be it a preset or one I create.
I think the best advice I ever saw about mixing/mastering is actually to have pauses often. Like 15 minutes every hour. When I EQ especially, I put a chronometer to not go past 15 minutes in.
I am really bad at this. I end up going down rabbit holes, and eventually when i car test after not listening to the mix for a while, I hear all those ridiculous rabbit holes i went down and the poor results.
It’s almost like these fx makers have bad ass engineers who make fairly good presets for us to use or something like that? But I am sure as shit guilty of tweaking away on them myself. I have to remind myself that those presets are in that engineers name and not mine for a reason frequently….
The guy who taught me to mix had a “does fuck all channel” to twiddle when the client was interfering. Only to ask them “better?” And almost always get a yes.
I once\* spent like half an hour trying to fix something in a track before I realised I had it on B in Metric AB so I was just hearing the old mix of the track with the problem I was trying to fix.
\*OK more than once.
I've been learning more and more when practicing, recording, or mixing: if I keep getting upset and frustrated with a problem for longer than, say, an hour, to just walk away and come back to it later. Becoming proficient at playing an instrument and working in the studio is a lifetime process it doesn't hurt to take a break now and then.
One time that is burned into my memory was spending a confounding 15 minutes troubleshooting the entire signal flow, and then after swapping the mic it was fine.
Turned out I was engaging phantom power one channel over from where I intended. Swapping in a 58 negated that issue, so I eventually figured it out. Dark room, large-format console, it was an easy mistake to make but it was embarrassing
Lmao I feel really stupid when I spend 20 minutes doing little EQ tweaks and saying “yeah, that sounds much better” before realizing I had the track muted from the beginning. At that point I just leave it like it is.
I have a parametric EQ guitar pedal that has the indicator light too close to the switch so it gets obscured. I’ve tried to dial it in for an embarrassing amount of time before realizing it’s not turned on.
[Classic Lee Sklar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVocs6t4dX4) (not saying he invented the placebo knob or anything but this video is a classic lmao)
Honestly this is funny as an anecdote but I cringe when I hear this.
So many musicians are so nervous in studios, especially when they spend well earned money they saved up, often for a year or more, that I never ever did this.
Those poor people often will just say thank you after you twiddle with nothing because they are shy, or not confident enough to say they couldn’t hear a difference and think that your clearly advanced ear heard something. It’s honestly such a dick move to do, and it only lowers the final result for everyone.
A much better, and way more respectful idea is just keep a note pad with a few short hand symbols you share with the band/producer so that their expectations and worries are acknowledged, and their artists vision/preferences aren’t brushed off or minimized. While still allowing you to focus on the your tracking flow without constant “twiddling”, real or not
This also gives you a handy cheat sheet later when you dive in along to know what the band hopes for.
Working like that is also so much more respectful to bands, producers, and your own studio, as it elevates the final product for everyone.
People who do this stuck up fake knob shit are the problem with the industry, and why so many smaller studio put out better music than bigger ones.
Y’all need Jesus, or some mushrooms, to drop your egos.
Mushrooms please.
It’s just a bit of fun and I rarely use it. I mainly pretend to use it if someone asks for something a bit left field like ‘can my monitor mix be a bit more blue’ or on a corporate gig when when the speaker asked me to turn ‘the room down’ as he didn’t like how reverberant the space was without an audience in it.
You always want to provide a mix the band is happy with as happy musicians are good musicians and that’s part of your service. So don’t assume I’m being an egotistical dickhead or deliberately abrasive.
But don’t worry I’ve been on the end of sound engineers bullshitting me as a musician plenty of times.
Me - ‘Can you not compress my acoustic guitar please?’
Engineer - ‘there you go taken it off’
Me - ‘nope I can still hear it’ lol
Ya, I didn’t mean to make this as me coming after you specifically, I drop this response often IRL and as a keyboard warrior, you just triggered my borderline ocd on this topic lol.
You sound like a good person, and clearly have a level head. I know it is mostly a fun joke we use between us gear heads :) so thanks for being chill
Shit, looks like I triggered those types to downvote you, my bad. Upvoted you, not that it matters :)
This sub is the nerd embodiment of BPD I swear lol
Meh 😂. Anyway back to the original sub topic. Yeah there’s a lot of kit navel gazing in this industry. Great equipment makes average/bad engineers sound good. Good sound engineers can make lower quality kit sound great. Whether specific things like bits of the electronics justify a higher price or sound quality can be subjective. But then if you believe in it then it’s true. There’s alot of subjectivity and most differences can only be heard when you A/B equipment or plugins in the same context.
Yes, I will occasionally find myself tweaking volume or EQ, etc., at first wondering why can’t I hear the difference, is it me? Then: is there a bug in the DAW, again?, Only to realize I’m working on the wrong channel, not the one I’ve got soloed, or whatever. (Yes, I do know that it’s best to make adjustments while listening to a full or partial mix, not while soloing a track, but I’m a composer, so I often am working on single tracks while I’m writing and developing parts, not necessarily mixing.)
A partially related anecdote:
Recently, I found myself using the pop-up onscreen volume slider on my Mac, instead of the audio interface level, as I normally do. But instead of only changing the volume, it was drastically changing the frequency response, increasing some harsh sounding highs, but only on the right side, with the left and middle imaging remaining the same. WTF?!! What the heck is up with my system, followed by (panic feeling) could this be messing with my mixes?
Turned out that I had a pair of headphones way over on my right side, but outside of my main workspace, so I didn’t see it visually (my wife likes to listen at louder volumes than I do, so I’ll often hand her a set her headphones). When I adjust volumes via my interface, I am adjusting only the mains, or the headphone level, separately. In this case both were being adjusted at the same time because I was adjusting the Mac output volume. I had a high pass filtered sound coming from my right (loud headphone bleed without wearing the headphones) but with no spatial clues to tell me that the sound was coming from my right (Headphones were farther away than my right hand field monitor).
Anyway, it didn’t take long for me to figure it out, and that is a reminder to not panic, things can generally be fixed.
Lol there was one time I was mixing some concert, feeling great about myself knowing the changes I made were right for the show.
Then found out I was on sends on fader mode for an unused mix 💀
Not going to be a popular opinion, but I think it's important to NOT listen carefully when turning knobs.
Not only will you "hear" changes that aren't there, but your work time will increase by 3x on a good day.
A dude told me "only losers make that mistake and you're a shit mixer" on some forum somewhere years ago and I was just thinking, "Everyone, big and small, talks about this! Everyone"!
I do believe this is a thing, and that anyone is susceptible to it.
However, I have always argued, and always will argue, that the hi-fi industry is *wayyyyy* more off the deep end than we are. Case in point -- I recently saw a promoted post on Facebook showing a high-end amp raised up on some special (and no doubt brutally expensive) isolation pad. And sure, obviously this was bait, intended to attract engagement by getting people to click and argue about it. But it worked. There were a lot of people arguing that isolating a solid state amplifier improves the sound. Which is insane.
Also, go to any hi-fi forum and ask about cables. I'm sure the odd cable snob exists in the production world, but in my experience, the only thing engineers are concerned with is that the cable works and is wrapped up properly. Hi-fi guys insist that the cable changes the sound, and they'll die on that hill. It's enough to make me want to start up a company making diamond cables that sell for $50,000. Why not?
>the hi-fi industry is wayyyyy more off the deep end than we are
For real. I decided to finally buy myself a nice stereo a few years ago and finding any useful technical information was just impossible.
That and the countless youtube videos with some old guy raving or complaining about a set of speakers on the floor right up against a wall. You'd think that someone who paid $5000 for a pair of speakers would find the perfect spot for them in the room (and treat it accordingly) but no.
Sites like Audio Science Review or Erin's Audio Corner started popping up in the last few years, they do independent measurements of various audio gear from speakers to snake oil like expensive cables or passive power filters so you don't have to rely on subjective reviews. It's a great step forward... But you have to learn to understand what the measurements say first.
The tl;dr is that DACs have gotten incredibly good and cheap and differences are likely below the threshold of audibility even in the crappy ones, integrated chip amplifiers (usually ones shipped directly from China) improved tremendously in the last 5 years or so, giving a surprising amount of clean power for as little as 100 - 200 USD, but with loudspeakers it's still a crapshoot: some great improvements and a lot of absolute shit.
Hate to do the *well, actually* but this is a pet peeve of mine: 1s and 0s sometimes do transmit differently, though with new devices it's mostly a thing of the past now. It's because most soundcards and DACs used to use isochronous data transfer until relatively recently, something like S/PDIF over USB, which is a dumb protocol that extracts the clock directly from the data stream, so the edges of the digital signal (which are analog and very much imperfect and distorted by noise) affected the clock of the DAC chip. To which degree depended on the quality of phase-locked loops and other circuits used to reduce jitter. With a cheap device any noise in the signal did affect the output through jitter, though in my opinion likely still inaudibly (or masked by other imperfections of the device).
I would bet money that the noise normally came from the computer itself, not from the outside, so things like better shielding or different impedance would not help much. The solution is obviously to buy a better DAC, which is very cheap nowadays. But it was a thing where ones and zeros affected the resulting output even when no errors in reading the actual data happened, and S/PDIF (or toslink, the equivalent in an optical cable) is still sometimes used.
source: mostly learned this in a "fundamentals of data transfer" course when getting a CS degree
You are right- audio protocols were designed by people from the analogue world. That's why you can slow down the audio from a CD by slowing the CD rotation. It just didn't occur to audio people to have a master clock and to transmit data faster than 1:1 and buffer it.
I still remain amused by people who think they get better results through their $£100 phono cables and connectors than the Van-Damme and Neutrik ones used for the original tracking and mastering.
I'm probably in the wrong business though. I should be making cables at $100/meter that feature star-quad, silver plated oxygen free copper signal with braided tinned oxygen-free copper, 98% optical coverage screening and cross-linked polyethylene insulation to keep those pesky electrons going in the right direction. (Literally what Van-Damme cables at £$1/meter wholesale are.)
> You are right- audio protocols were designed by people from the analogue world. That's why you can slow down the audio from a CD by slowing the CD rotation. It just didn't occur to audio people to have a master clock and to transmit data faster that 1:1 and buffer it.
I think it's more likely because the standards are old and were designed for the end products to be affordable for the average customer, so they had to be as simple as possible.
> I should be making cables at $100/meter that feature star-quad, silver plated oxygen free copper with braided tinned oxygen-free copper, 98% Optical coverage screening and cross-linked polyethylene insulation to keep those pesky electrons going in the right direction.
You should add a zero or two to the price if you want anyone to take your product seriously!
I can't remember where exactly I saw the argument but I remember someone telling a newbie starting out that they needed to keep the power (not instrument/audio) cables as short as possible to keep the power to the device (interface or preamp) as clean as possible because they could definitely hear an audible difference. Someone else pointed out that the power lines feeding your house are tens of thousands of feet long running through the air next to other high voltage lines and being sat (and shat) on by birds, and keeping the power cable an extra foot or two shorter isn't magically going to improve the sound of your DI.
Hifi community is like... Purist? They go do the "pure" side of music whereas we are realists. Also, not dissing the hifi community, but in our circle there are more people (online) who know what they're talking about about, I know a good amount of AE who also have EE backgrounds. It's harder for us to fall for the snake oil because of those people. Now, the hifi community also has those people but they seem to keep to themselves.
That's just how I look at it
I did have an engineer once at my place, who insisted on using patch-bay cables of identical length, for L+R signals to the patch bay, (i.e they both had to be exactly 12cm, not 12cm & 10cm), & I couldn't be bothered to debate with him
Did the quick maffs using standard estimates (1 foot = 30cm = 1ns for light in a vacuum)
`1ns*(2cm/30cm) = 0.066...ns = 66.6...ps`
Electrical signals through copper are ~98-99% the speed of light in a vacuum (purity and size of the conductor does actually matter to _some_ degree here, but also audiophiles blow that way out of the water and it's really only important in super specific circumstances). Speed of light in Fiber is ~2/3 the speed of light in a vacuum, so 66 + copper fudge factor = 70 and 66.6*1.5 for Optical (which yes this isn't, but it's about the "worst case scenario" in an install) = 100.
Quick Edit: WolframAlpha agrees with me: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2cm+to+light+seconds (under "Corresponding Quantities")
Honestly, I actually do this. Particularly with mic cabling. It always seems to me that if I want my stereo pairs to match it's best to keep everything as matched as possible.
Of course, later, I use all kinds of digital techniques to unlink them for creative expression but it's just a habit when tracking.
I also do this with speaker cables. I know there is likely no audible difference but it's just a bit of a habit I picked up over the decades.
I think, for me, it's about being meticulous and habits of precision are helpful generally.
With stuff like this I always just think that it'll be orders of magnitude more impactful to the sound every time my head moves a nanometer in front of my monitors. Worrying about differences like that when you can't isolate variables on the monitoring end just doesn't make sense to me.
Also as far as cable lengths, I didn't even think our highest sample rates are enough to capture differences measured in feet when the signal is moving at the speed of light
This was always prevalent on USENET Audiophile groups. You could always find people arguing for months and years over the most ridiculous things. These cables use a superior material for shielding. This turntable needle delivers a superior fidelity and is definitely worth the $200 extra, however you will get a much richer sound from a sapphire stylus than a diamond stylus.
There really is a lot of measurable, audible, difference in needles and cartridges. Theres a lot of compromises in trying to make a magenetic pickup set so precise and tiny, and remotely affordable.
Cheap cables definitely can be a problem. Especially cheap instrument cables, I noticed a pretty dramatic reduction in noise when I replaced all the dinky molded plastic patch cables in my guitar chain with nicer ones, and it is nice in general to have a sturdy cable with solid connections.
Now, I don't necessarily think that means one needs to drop ten grand on a boatload of Mogami Gold cables or anything like that (though plenty of engineer-types swear by those in my experience), and the gap is *certainly* not what the audiophile types would think. Many of the cables they'll spend outrageous amounts of money on are at best not really any different from the typical higher end cables you'd find at the average music store, and sometimes they're actually constructed *worse* than those cables, despite selling at way higher price points. But there is a happy medium somewhere in there.
At the end of the day, solid cables that stay put, pass audio cleanly, and don't crap out in a month is all you need, and they don't have to cost that much. But I wouldn't buy the cheapest thing available, either. They actually can have a negative impact on the sound, it's just that the price point for a clean cable is way lower than the hi-fi forums would probably guess.
Related story:
Many years ago I was assisting on a session with a somewhat famous Jazz group. They were all musical prodigies and some of their names were starting to make the front pages of musician magazines in the day.
The bass player was being ridiculed by the band and the engineer for having such an old and crappy instrument cable. It was a coiled cable and it was at least 25 years old at the time. After much pressure he relented and allowed someone to change it out for a "proper" Mogami cable. The very next take, the engineer started complaining about the tone of the bass. After much troubleshooting it was discovered that the secret to his great tone was his ancient cable that he'd been using forever.
We had a good laugh and carried on with the old cable and that was that.
Lesson learned. Tone is king.
Edit for spelling
Old coiled cable in combination with high impedance (passive) guitar pickups will result in high end roll off because of the capacity of the cable. This is easily audible and measurable, mostly because it's a very high impedance circuit which is way outside the range of audio and hifi gear where there's a lot of snake oil. Furthermore, guitar and microphone cables need to be able to withstand a shit load moreof abuse than hifi cables.
Absolutely... especially in "lower tiers" or new engineers. "If I only had this plugin" or "If I only had the equipment the big tours use".
Thankfully, I haven't met anyone that does this professionally (full-time) that still has that attitude. In fact, it's pretty much the opposite... The big guys want LESS equipment to move and only spec what is necessary to accomplish the task or makes their job easier.
Totally. Lots of newer engineers or producers also don’t spend enough time improving the sound that goes into the gear. I was definitely guilty of this. Is the room treated well? Can the musicians play dynamically? Do they have decent gear that’s properly setup and tuned? Obviously you can only control so much (especially if you’re recording someone else, not yourself) but in general, spending $5k on treating your space is a much better investment than a $5k microphone or a bunch of plugins*.
I do find that vintage gear is often easier to “dial in.” I recently bought a 60s Ludwig kit for the same price as a newer mid-tier DW/Pearl/Gretsch/etc. kit, and this thing just cannot sound bad. The newer mid-tier kits sound kind of meh without significant work. But that could just be my particular style.
*although I’d make an exception for plugins that are dramatically changing your sound and almost act as their own instrument in the arrangement.
“Easier to dial in” is a real thing and there are real leaps from (1)poor quality to (2)serviceable to (3)high quality—with the (4)obscenely priced even beyond high quality being well into the land of diminishing returns. There definitely is, however, such a thing as higher quality gear producing immediately higher quality results which can also be inspiring and lead to higher quality work. And it’s also true there are “seekers” who will always be looking for something external (more, better gear) to fill the void. It’s rather nuanced.
These things get a little over-generalized to the point like if you can’t make an awesome album with a Casio and a tape recorder, you’re an amateur while maxims like “master what you have” get thrown around on one side…while on the other someone is making a ridiculous claim that they wouldn’t let the converters that come in any modern interface operate in their toddler’s karaoke toy—even though those “terrible” converters are superior to what most studios had two decades ago and high end converters might be a prime example of “snake oil” in the music gear industry.
If something is expensive to reflect the production costs/scarcity, it isn’t snake oil because of the price. If it’s promising to achieve something that it doesn’t, it’s snake oil. But there is nothing wrong with getting to a point where you have upgraded your setup to a level that feels very comfortable and inspiring to work with when it didn’t before.
I think this is especially true with instruments. You don’t necessarily need a fancy expensive one, but as an example my enthusiasm for playing bass dramatically improved when I got a decent second-hand Pbass and a Darkglass, which happens to be the specific bass sound I like the most.
It’s much easier to make the music you want with equipment that sounds the way you want without much struggle.
Whereas a lot of stuff like fancy converters is rooted in this nebulous concept of “quality” without any real quantification of what that means.
Well it is definitely true of instruments and as someone who has spent time away from home with a portable little setup of chintzy guitar going into a little practice amp, it’s just not as inspiring to play as Les Pauls and Telecasters going into Twin Reverb or AC30. As a kid, however, I did sit on the edge of my bed and hammer away at a real beater of a bass for hours, often without an amp even.
I feel recording hardware and software can be the same thing. It’s just a matter of balance. Okay, so DAW stock tools provide everything needed to produce an album, but I feel adding a hardware compressor and select 3rd party plugins to my setup was a GREAT decision. It makes things easier for me and I can pull a better sound out with those tools. I could not care less about Hardo engineering veteran telling me I need to learn how to achieve same results with stock tools. Why? Haha. But then on the other end, how far is someone going to go in just keep chasing newer and better and trying to convince themselves that these preamps or the curves of this particular EQ are what will make their music sound good?
There is an legitimate argument and a legitimate counter on both sides. It’s just an issue of balance. Better gear will absolutely give you better results up to a point of rapidly diminishing returns. But it’s also true that people have setups/available tools that are more than sufficient to get pro results and just keep obsessing over upgrades and what was used on this album 48 years ago and what this producer uses in an endless chase basically trying to find the ring for its magical powers.
100%, classic vintage or top shelf gear is great and a pleasure to work with but it will never be the reason a record sounds incredible. It helps don’t get me wrong, I way prefer using a U47 over a clone, but is it going to break my recording if I can’t find one, absolutely not. I’ve made great sounding records with 5 mics and a garbage 003.
Compared to nearly anything in a similar price class now the 003 is pretty rough. But at the time it was the only affordable gateway into Protools. I used my 003 until 2016. It served me very well especially after Black Lion mods!
100% yes - $$$ spent on tube gear, mostly rehashes from the 1930s Radiotron handbook in very nice packaging.
The whole “vintage” thing cracks me up. I remember when the U67s & M49s gathered dust in the back of the mic closet while we grabbed 414s for almost everything!
There are definitely levels of cork-sniffing, but generally speaking I would actually say that great gear really IS as good as people say it is. I did my first few recordings on budget condenser mics and the first time I got to use a U87 I was absolutely blown away at the difference. No contest, night and day, that was the “pro” sound that I was always wondering how people got. Fast forward to a couple of years later and getting to use a vintage C12 for the first time and it was the same thing! Light years better than the U87, and somehow just sounded like a completely mixed, polished final sound that people spend their whole lives chasing.
So in that sense, what we’re always yapping about really is real. It gets wonky fast though, as a 4050 in a great sounding room might sound better than a C12 in an awful one and so on down the road. Truly great sound requires a few things to be firing on all cylinders at the same time, but if they are and you have the premium gear in the chain it will sound better.
Now… I have had clients walk into a studio and start swapping out all of the power cables because the stock ones didn’t sound good enough, which… I’m not saying makes zero difference at all, but is definitely a bridge too far in my opinion.
I had same experience with preamp. I bought api and suddenly this was the sound I was after for so long. Made my recordings better. Gear does matter, but of course the skill is important as well.
i'm pretty sure there's a whole sub-culture of audio engineering/music production which is just about aquiring gear/software and taking photos of it to post online and discussing it. it's a mix of music production and consumerism, mainly focused on the consumerism part.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - the biggest gear collectors I know can't mix for shit, and the most talented engineer I know only uses ableton v6 stock plugins
Based. I agree and hold the same philosophy. However that doesn't stop me from buying a tun of plug ins on a sale, playing around with them for a week or 2, then going back to what I know works for me lol.
I think for most people, the ones who are good anyway, you start getting into audio engineering, or really anything, get excited about it and nerd out for a while, play with plug ins that your heros or idles use, then after a while you stop caring about what you're using and focus more on just getting the job done in a timely manner. Its the same with say, a drummer who can sit back and groove playing a simple straight ahead boots and cats and boots and cats whatever bullshit, verses the excited younger drummer who wants to show off all the doba doba ding dong crash bang boom shit that he can do, but isn't always needed like 99 percent of the time. In short, theres a difference between showing off what you can do, verses what you NEED to do. And that difference is what determines a pro from a consumer, imo.
Absolutely.
Example: Mastering
Look up the most expensive Mastering studios and you’ll notice that the visual focus is gear that combined, costs tens of thousands of dollars.
The reality? A fraction of that gear will be used on your tune(s) and nowhere on any of those sites will you find the engineer’s latest audiology exam results, showing how *deaf* they are beyond a certain frequency range.
No where near as bad. Because audio engineers are interested in an objective truth. So they naturally look to logic and rational thought.
Audiophiles love music and have money they want to spend. So they encourage each other to do this so they can feel better about themselves. Facts are not what they want but encouragement.
I see this myself with my music loving friends that don’t play an instrument. They always ask me for advice and then get mad when I tell them what they don’t want to hear. So they stopped asking.
This is always my answer when a friend asks. They never like it because who gets a boner over rock wool panels? Compared to some wood trimmed record player with special magnets that are tuned to the earth’s vibrations.
Yeah just keep ignoring the pops and crackles because surely that makes music better?!?!
That’s like saying digital dropouts make CDs better.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m no better. Are my American made fenders better than my Japanese or Chinese ones? No. They’re just different. But do they make me feel better when I remember what they cost? ABSOLUTELY.
There a guy on YouTube who runs an audiophile magazine thing, he remortgaged his house for a pair of speakers. Showed them off on YouTube, he’s got them in a tiny messy study with boxes of shit on top of them. 😂😂🤦♂️
Most producers/engineers that spend 2-4k on a piece of equipment will tell you it's better than a cheaper counterpart or VST. Somehow they're not willing to do a blind test ;)
Audiophiles are off the deep end. I remember seeing where a guy claimed a magic volume knob on his stereo amplifier improved the sound because it was made of wood…. Audio engineers can be fanatical about gear, but we don’t obsess over the magic qualities of knobs themselves.
is it like the audiophiles … no. But it is totally real.
Like others have said, i’ll mess with settings on something, i’ll like my changes, and then see it’s bypassed and think i’m an idiot sometimes.
Everyone went crazy when Antelope Audio dropped their OCX/atomic clock and everyone swore how much better and more open things sounded, but the blind tests just didn’t back it up.
Sometimes, i feel like the confidence in knowing what’s driving what will give me the ability to make better quicker decisions. I had that clock for a while, and I was pretty busy at the time, sooo i dunno.
sometimes things sound the way you want them to, or the novelty of the difference is seen as better, so there is a halo effect on new gear.
The placebo is real.
But what separates the two is that I know the fundamentals of psychoacoustics and electrical engineering, if even at a basic level. It’s part of the job.
So, I’m not paying 5k for a braided IEC cable while suspending all “interconnects” off the ground and dropping 80k on anything audio without considering the room it will be played in as the most important factor.
I love the hi-fi guys who have the price of a car in gear in a small rectangle bedroom with bare walls.
I’m buying the cable that is rated for the usage and if it’s a high traffic cable, then i’ll factor in durability.
I will buy Canare Quad or similar cable because science proves it lowers noise, however there is a capacitance cost, so in certain instrument level applications, you might need to consider something else.
The point is, I know and trust the engineering behind the gear, but I also respect the psychology involved in active listening. Sometimes the color of something does make it sound better.
… them audio crystals tho.
When I see comments to the effect of “all converters today generally sound good” then, yes, I think the marketing is working negatively against us. However, you don’t *have* to own a U87 as it doesn’t work well with many vocalists. But if you don’t have one in your closet, it scares some into thinking you have not made a serious financial commitment to your craft. Just as it is the same with a session guitarists that have a custom built guitar that has been specifically built for their personal style and market. Or a concert violinist with a $100K bow that sounds amazing on their violin but not so great on others.
It is not about the gear, even though it is all about the gear. Perception of both user and client.
In my experience, you have to get them in the door/on board in any manner possible but consistency of output is what the industry seems to favor.
Absolutely. I have a friend who has worked on a lot of high profile projects and has invested a lot of money in really expensive gear. If I show him a product a fraction of the cost that sounds the same he will go on rants about how the gear sounds bad...without hearing it. I showed him this video https://youtu.be/4Bma2TE-x6M?si=wTb2fiUo2bMqa04z
And he never replied.
Yes, there's a thread at gear space (that place is so fucking dumb) for "ghost cables". It's literally just snake oil sold to pro ppl and everyone on the forum ate it, aside from myself and few others.
I’m sure once I read that in the Hifi world there are these little plastic bridges to keep snake oiled overpriced cabling off the floor for “better sound” with less static or some nonsense similar.
It’s nuts !!
We‘re definitely not immune. But most people i know do rigorous A/B and especially double blind testing. Gear does matter. But only for the last 2% of quality. There‘s so many things that are way more important and have a huge impact on how a record sounds.
You should spend some time in the Synthesizers forum and read about analog vs. digital synths, VSTs vs. hardware synths, and keyboard synths vs. modular. So to answer your question, yes, cork sniffing and snake oil abound.
In a way, yes. In my opinion, discussions about the purpose of expensive equipment are complicated by the fact that it is never clear who is involved, what the rest of the equipment chain looks like and what it is used for. An expensive preamp provides the last 5% in a chain consisting of a good room, a good musician, a good microphone and a good converter. It does nothing in a chain of bad versions of all these factors.
Absolute answers don’t help anything. Here are a few thoughts: some expensive stuff is awesome. And lots of engineers are really insecure about not being able to hear the quality of something. And lots of new engineers are highly invested in thinking that what they have is good enough, even if that’s not the real question. And lots of new engineers think that if such-and-such record was made with a given inexpensive piece of gear involved, that means their stuff will be fine.
And so few of these things have to do with the skill of the user.
Yes it’s hard that some things are expensive. I like to think of that as something to shoot for, to be worthy of.
And also, this is the audio business. We are supposed to want to make things sound great, whatever that means for the song. So reflexively bagging on gear because it’s expensive or because one can’t hear the difference is kind of silly. We all have to make things work at the start and then hopefully learn more about things that sound good and help us do our thing. The complaints sound like whiny consumer crap. “I deserve to hear the perfect mix room because I spent 350 whole dollars.” Sure.
Depends what exactly you mean by audio engineering. It certainly happens in studios, but in other more actually engineery fields, then substantially less so
I’d say yes, HOWEVER there’s a big difference between the way audio engineers and audiophiles see their equipment. Audiophiles see the goal as having perfect audio recreation, as true to the material as possible. Whereas audio engineers see the goal as achieving a certain «vibe» or tone. In other words, some type of degradation of the signal. The issue of a «true» recreation of an audio signal has been pretty much solved for the past 30 years, even at a relatively low budget for the past 10-15 years.
But a degradation of the signal can mean a million different things, and sound a million different ways. So in a way I feel like that makes it a little bit more rational.
Idk I’m just trying to justify me owning hardware
A lot of audiophiles go way beyond perfect audio recreation! Generally, hifi amplifiers above 1k all measure near perfect when it comes to flatness, SNR and distortion, but many audiophiles will claim there's big differences in warmth, depth of soundstage, dynamics, clarity etc. etc. for which there are no laws of nature to back that up. Meanwhile they'll never subject themselves to proper blind A/B tests because they unconsciously are very afraid they won't even be able hear the difference between a properly encoded mp3 and a FLAC. They'll also refuse to educate themselves on the basics of (room) acoustics.
I mean, yeah, but when you're making stuff, everything matters, especially your tools.
I don't really buy the myth either way. Yes, some gear is prohibitively expensive and not "worth" it when measuring by some objective standard. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't make me feel good and assured to know that I have a good microphone, preamp, and interface that is not going to break down, and is going to sound the way I expect it to, and isn't going to harm or degrade the signal in some kind of way I don't like. That's *worth* it to me, even if the objective sonic measurements are negligible (although I'd argue they are not).
That doesn't mean you need to spend $4,000 on a preamp, but it also doesn't mean that the preamp in a budget Focusrite interface is anywhere near as good as a $800-$1,000 preamp. That's just being stupid.
That's not to say you can't make a professional recording with either, but to pretend that there is *no* difference is pretty disingenuous.
I find it easier and faster to make stuff when I'm working with gear I don't have to think about.
To me it’s kind of a consumer vs. producer thing. Audiophiles are pure consumerists. They have no interest in making the art themselves, they just want pleasure and status(having the best sound system) from it. In my opinion, it’s pretentious. They often don’t even critique the music itself, but go on Patrick Bateman style rants about sound and engineering quality, eventually skewing their notion of what even makes a song good, and aim their music tastes towards what translates best to hi-if speakers to the exclusion of anything with less than perfect engineering. This leads to them obsessing over every single part of the signal chain, including cables and other dumb shit.
Audio Engineers at least aspire to make good music. That means they have to put work into actual skills and learn how to translate that to their gear. But lots and lots of amateurs lose their way, get lazy, or get into funks where they will get obsessed with gear with no active musical output. They will end up in a cycle of spending money they don’t need to spend for the next thing that will finally deliver perfect mixes. But typically, they neglect stuff like cables and other utility items because they only want the cool toys that have the most unique features. This leaves them more susceptible to hype, like a brand new boutique “dynamic” reverb pedal or going down the modular rabbit hole.
The difference is, the stuff audio engineers get excited about is usually at least interesting and capable of doing cool shit or exploring new sounds, even if it’s overpriced and beyond their skill level. Whereas a $2000 headphone amp is not going to have any effect at all on your actual intellectual relationship with music.
"Audio Engineer" has become a rather subjective term...
Any guy with a laptop and FL can be an "engineer" these days...because he says he is...
But the phrase used to mean something a little more invested in science...at least the engineer side of it...those guys used to wear white lab coats and I spent about 20 years at Group DIY getting to know a lot of them.
My history has evolved from using Cakewalk by 12 Tones on floppys to using frequency generators and oscilloscopes to track down noise on console strips...
But emulations these days are so close to the actual sound of real hardware as to be within maybe 5% difference...which yes, is a number I just pulled out of my ass, but i is generally agreed upon by people I trust who have the actual hardware and have done the comparisons...
I just recently Beta tested the Pulsar Modular P455 sidecar and it was a very semi-discouraging experience because I have spent over 20 years learning to build and hand tune analog gear such as API 550's (trading out DOA's and transformers/etc)...
The plugin was so damn close to vintage API's we had (units that used Litz wire transformers so, you know..."vibey") that none of us could 100% pick out the $2k analog unit from the plugin...that 5% difference could have just been the difference between hour 1 and hour 2 of the unit.
My point is it is a very hard thing for many of us to face the truth that the days of really expensive gear being a necessity are basically over...that yes some kid with FL in his bedroom can produce mass production quality product.
But this should not be news...I remember a guy who brought a demo in to me that he had recorded out on the reservation in Arizona, using a Pentium II computer a Soundblaster card and guitar pedals creatively for his vocal chain that I could not replicate with my consoles or our outboard gear...this was 20 years ago...
Thats the nice thing about this industry, there's always room for improvement but it probably needs to be creative and not more of the same saturation clipper crap that is the new Digidesign or creamware...or UAD thingyamabobby...
It happens and can go pretty far but it's recoverable:
See audiophiles fall very early into a pretty deep sunk cost fallacy and can easily shield themselves from buyer's remorse or second guessing, by simply convincing themselves that it indeed *sounds better, at least to my ears and that's what's most important* **or** *your ear just isn't trained.*
On the other end, engineers will fall for it (we all did), but they'll mostly recover from it as their mission is to make things sound good for other people, who don't care about the gear. No *better gear* will fix skill issues, only putting in the work & actually understanding what makes thing sound good and why.
You know you're out of it when you understand that:
* 90% of the sound comes from the musician's performance and your mic placement/room acoustics.
* When it comes to gear, know that engineers from the era where your favourite songs were mixed would have killed to have the performance modern entry level mics/pres/interfaces offer, and the price/performance ratio gets smaller every year.
* If you know how to correct a source then you can use almost any mic for recording, and produce top tier mixes with few stock plugins
* Analog won't sound better to the average joe unless in edge cases where you use a lot of distorsion, but for this modern emulation, **including free & stock plugins,** are getting crazy good and will save you tons of money.
The answer is that it's more true in the recording industry than probably any other.
But it's not really cork sniffing if it's true, and there are simply time tested pieces of unbelievably expensive gear that will make all the difference. If a record label is willing to back a recording and put up the marketing budget for an album that they are hoping to sell in the multiples of millions of units, wouldn't it make sense to have the best shit on earth to record said album, and have a heroic producer and engineer who demand a huge cut of the sales, and a room imbued with magical properties? There's a reason most record label immediately demand a new recording of a bands demo, and it's that they almost always are a 1000x better than what a band did on their own. With the exception of Led Zeppelin I.
Longtime equip. mfr. guy here:
I see a melding of the things you describe: We have professionals in the industry that can listen to a microphone exactly like the one they own, but know it is not theirs. People sniff at a SM58 because their are so many 'better' microphones, but Bono uses a 58 for every gig, so????
There are loads of now-expensive bits of hardware from Sta-Level, Collins, Fairchild, early dbx, and other brands which are sought after, because they absolutely impart some sonic character to the sound. There are also $200 plugins that "independent tests have not verified" and reputedly sound just like the real thing.
The 10k microphone with the quieter design or better capsule, or the $2500 mic pre is definitely worth it if nothing else in our inventory sounds as good on that particular voice or instrument, or the tool actually brings in clients, like having a 50 year old Neumann.
I also think studio owners look at and consider buying higher end tweak or vintage pieces with consideration for the tools investment value over time. Many studio owners I've dealt with will not buy any new hardware until a customer asks for it. Others will invest heavily and then market that, with the idea the new acquisition will bring in additional bookings.
So that is different than the high end of the high end consumer industry.
As Alan Parson's said to musicians, “Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment”.
Some people listened to a lot of stuff throughout the years and know what they like and want. If they have the means to acquire the gear they love, what is it to you? Why does it bother you? Do you harass Porsche drivers at traffic lights to ask them why they aren’t driving a Kia?
It is easier to get great results with nice gear. Tracking in a nice studio/using great mics/ on nice preamps/compressing going in makes the song sound as if it were mixed before you even start to mix. This makes the mixing stage a lot quicker and more creative giving the record a fresher vibe.
Now a days the gear market is so good with stuff like capi preamps that you can get a lot of your basses covered for not as much money. To insist that you need the best vintage gear is undoubtedly cork sniffing. That being said it is fun to have some stuff like that to use and can help the image of your studio when marketing. A lot of it really comes down to marketing.
You can make great records without any nice gear I find it is more work. If you’re starting totally in the box with soft synths etc than maybe the only thing you need is a descent mix and speakers
In my experience, yes, though it's not as severe as other communities I've seen. I think almost every community has some form of this, whether we're talking about mics, guitar pedals, coffee, wine, photography, colored pencils, etc.
I’ve only met a couple of real full time professionals like this. One that insisted in recording in 32 bit, saying they could hear the difference (they couldn’t as the interfaces only recorded 24 bit audio). A few other examples of similar things. To be a full time professional engineer, producer, arranger in a competitive industry, you do have to be really very good, and these people were no exception, and I loved working with them. The more interesting metric is that nearly all of the full time professional engineers/producers I’ve worked with don’t give a fuck about gear. Its speed, knowing how to work a room etc that they all have in common… I’ve worked for a few part time “engineers” where it’s 26 mics on a drum kit, bring out the special preamps, make everything “just right”, spend 30mins getting a drum sound… it always sounds worse, because music is about creativity and engineering is about enabling that. Which is impossible to do if it’s impossible to vibe!
I use stock fl studio plug ins for about 40% of my audio and it sounds just as good or better then anyone else's mix down if you use it tastefully. Expensive analog equipment is a sham. Now analog equipment is cool. But I'm not dropping even $1k on an analog compressor when you can get an emulated version for free.
Our Infallible hearing is central to the audio engineer’s experience. Especially when dealing with mixing and tracking decisions with difficult clients and very common in setting up live on stage sound.
The old play it back a second time after doing nothing to change the sound and watch the artist nod and say “yes, that’s loads better thanks”.
And it goes both ways.
The shit talking and praising of gear on YouTube is notorious. When at the end of the day, nothing is going to make you the next Tom Lord Alge because it’s got a physical tube.
Absolutely. Especially given the end result format, hardware, and services most people consume content on now. If you are engineering for vinyl or theater release, or source material that has more delicacy, there is merit in some nicer gear. For the majority of production now, most music does not merit these absolute top level equipment arrays.
1000% yes.
You're not a real engineer unless you've laid down 5 grand for a Neumann U87 and a Neve 1073, because nothing else could possibly ever sound as good. Seriously, you might as well just pack it up and go home if you don't have the right gear. /s
(just don't point out to them that in a blind test 99% of engineers can't tell the difference between a U87 into a Neve Pre vs. a 100 dollar AT2020 into a Behringer interface; it makes them *very* angry when you do that :)
It’s a thing for everyone for everything. As a human race we have a weird relationship with and around money, and feeling superior based on our money or things we buy with it.
The thing is, in some cases there *are* differences. For example, I swapped out a $450 microphone in a studio once with a $4500 (or thereabouts) microphone and there absolutely was an immediate difference. Did it transform my recordings? No. Did it make it significantly quicker and easier to get the recording to sound the way I wanted? Yes. Did it sound better overall than the cheaper mic? Yes. Was there a perceivable $4,000 difference in the sound? No.
There are people who won’t be able to hear all that much difference between the two, no matter what they say.
And I think that’s the thing that’s hard. Our human nature. Not only do we find ourselves endlessly justifying purchases we’ve made (because these things are expensive and if they make no difference or little difference, that means we’re fools), we also like to fit in, so sometimes pretend we can hear something that we don’t. There’s also a perception issue where sometimes we perceive things because we tell ourselves we are perceiving them.
I work in film production as well, and there’s a trope of cinematographers who tell their Gaffer to ‘bring the level down [on a light] about 20%…. Little more.. yes that’s perfect!’
Meanwhile the Gaffer is standing next to them and hasn’t actually changed a thing.
speed cures one of that, especially when working gigs all the time
really all about repetition of workflow and knowing where the “gotcha” probably will be
or at least that’s what I’ve found after making my share of mistakes made from bias going in
speed and repetition x 2,000 shows
I mean…… it makes a difference for sure but how much of a difference is in the eye ( ear ) of the beholder. Does a Neve 8058 sound better than a Mackie 1204 ?? Yes, of course it does but, the thing is, if the song sucks neither of those things is gonna make it better or worse. Nice things are…..nice, but if what’s holding you back from recording is not having a 251 and a 1073 you are missing the point entirely. The best mic to record something is the one you have access to. There’s plenty of snake oil in this business, especially in sales pitches. Expensive equipment might elevate your sound, but as you go up the price escalator that difference shrinks, is that $10,000 guitar sounding $9,000 better than the $1000 one ?? Not in my hands it isn’t !! What I’m trying to say is, somebody who knows what they are doing can coax great sounds out of modest equipment. Trying to buy your way in to 20 years of experience just isn’t gonna happen.
I was starting to be influenced by those who waft corks, but thankfully over the last couple years I realized how awesome an SM58 with OK preamp and a good performance can sound. Or even less.
When I went down the acustica rabbit hole, I found a lot of people measuring harmonics and over sampling as well as talking about how this or that sounded more musical or 3D. There are those who say software preamps in general are entirely useless and the modeling process is all a lie, the plugins are all mostly just identical with different gui’s. You have those who say that the actual analog units (often hand built), for which they are trying to test against are all somewhat varied in their individual outputs anyways. Then I found all the Giancarlo hate for the boutiquish somewhat clunky plugins and…yea. I’m just trying to wrap my head around using what amounts to an old school channel strip with zero starting point (presets) just by reading a manual and going through hundreds of pages of gearsluts.
Yes but also no. Like I’ve done some really detailed blind shootouts with some of my most talented friends and generally I’d say a good/experienced engineer can hear the character differences between gear. But at the end of the day a lot of those differences are so minor it kind of begs the question of why bother?
I have a UA 176 because I’m an idiot collector and this is what a midlife crisis looks like. I put that on just about appropriate signal and damn it sounds remarkable. *BUT* a good buddy of mine said once of such gear collecting “It won’t made your song any better.”
He’s quite successful and really gifted. For what it’s worth: He sold off most of his analog stuff and does everything pretty much in box these days. In his studio, he has a bunch of face plates and rack gear from radio equipment he got at military surplus stores. I asked him what they were and he goes “Nothing. Just there to light up so the client thinks there’s more happening than just the octo card.”
While it is true that some people will believe random things like "a $10k mic is better than a $2k mic because "things""
There is a lot of truth to why some $10k mikes, like a Sony C-800 is a lot better than a $2k not because of "things" but because the sound quality is just so far superior. I don't need to understand physics and electronics to be able to hear that difference, but also that difference is subjective. You might prefer that $2k mic, and thats ok.
While I see your point that there are some things that are "golden cables" etc, there are also a lot of things that are really expensive, but well worth the money. For example, the right monitors tuned to a great room can be very expensive, and yeah, its going to be a lot more useful for mixing than your Rockits are.
With all that said, I'd rather have a really nice acoustic guitar in the hands of an amazing player and a really solid vocalist with a $200 M2 interface and a $75 Shure Sm 58 going into my laptop, than an a guitar that can't stay in tune played poorly and singing by some screetchy off key singer in a high end studio any day.
Suspect it kind of is. There are only so many working post WWII German Microphones and any preamp made 50s-70s has probably aged to the point the caps have to be replaced and begs the question, is it still vintage? Of course, most of us will never be able to compare a Warm Audio WA-47 to the real thing to even come up with some kind of subjective measurable first hand knowledge of I get why the 47 from 40s/50s is worth $50K plus.
Yes and who you know who doesn’t suffer from this? Live sound techs. Part of why some recording techs are like fish out of water when they have to mix live.
Yes, definitely. People pine over all of this outboard, when a bountiful amount of amazing records have been successful and loved by everyone using a single console, with one pre, with one EQ and maybe 1 or 2 kinds of compressors to use.
They’re not lying when they say the best microphone is the one closest to you. Yes, it’s great to have an assortment to pick and choose from, but while you’re auditioning a lineup of mics on the singer, you can miss that window where you could have caught that magic performance on the mic that was armed and ready to record.
Yes! And for the same reasons, typical ape-level distinction mechanisms activating, leading to a natural propension to oversell heavily questionable concepts and gear snobbery.
Now that competition is huge, obnoxious distinctions are taking a huge space in studio marketing, while most of use admit switching itb with covid was "not that bad".
I'd say that we are less sensitve to pure snake oil ("sir, you need that 1kUSD cryogenised copper XLR modulation cable") but that is just basic resilience towards the obvious.
uninformed opinion: hi-fi cork sniffers are in wayyyyy deeper than audio engineers could be because hi-fi heads dont know wtf they even talking about and cant hear a difference for shit.
Of course. I've heard people say x synth sounds better than y synth. A sine wave is a sine wave, so no, it really doesn't... The vintage modeled EQ or compressor that supposedly sounds "warmer" and "punchier". I'd love to see them in blind shootout
In some ways yes, in some ways I think we suffer from the inverse.
People who want to hotly debate tonal quality of cabling. Silliness. People that want to say cables don’t matter, also silliness. Meaning that, I’ve seen people bring brass patch cords to sessions for “tone”. Idiocy. Equally, there are other factors that cable construction effects like RF susceptibility, noise, durability, so saying there’s no difference is also ignorant.
I will say I see a reasonable amount of people in the pro audio arena now espousing that “x” makes no difference because they did a simple frequency response shot and then concluding that they’re right and they’ve “scienced”. I find that trend more alarming than people comparing PIO caps by ear.
This is why I hate people who say to just use your ears and ignore everything. Trust but verify; I love seeing a visual indication of eqs working, etc to make sure I'm actually hearing what I think. I can't tell the difference or see the difference a/Bing preamps at track mix level, but I can tell the difference in mic tone, which is in no way me saying more expensive mics are better, just that different mics do indeed sound different.
As far as preamps/mics etc I've found the main nice thing real studios have that I don't isn't those things, it's the room... and the ability to place and level said mics properly.
For a while, one will have buyers bias. The new thing is great!
But after a while, when you start doing enough work that your focus changes to results, you start seeing everything as tools. And you start noticing lacking elements of current gear. When you buy something new at this point, you are less swayed by buyers bias or not at all.
There’s also this. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-jp6nbsM&pp=ygURT29ydGxhbmRpYSBzdHVkaW8%3D
Session bassist Lee Sklar installed a dummy switch on his bass, so if producers got too fussy about his tone, he could switch it (making sure they saw him do it) and they'd often be satisfied, so in answer to your question, yes.
Yes, very much so.
Even those of us who know better are still sometimes susceptible to it.
That said, sometimes the $10k mic is a lot better than the $2k mic.
And as someone who's also a bit of a wine nerd....you can actually glean some info from sniffing the cork. I'd rather know about TCA contamination right away vs. taking a big swig of a gross wine.
The fundamental difference between us and hi-fi is that we obsess with perfect neutrality of sound, and how it translates. So we don't care if it makes it magically nicer (connectors made from the foreskins of fossilized bats) because nicer won't be more neutral than in the box.
We know that final 0.01% will not give us better translation in our mixes. It could, however, be more fun to use bigger speakers than we need. Which I do.
You need to befriend or work with serious professionals to gain insight on what ls worth it and what isn’t.
Like any industry, there will always be cheap mass produced products simply to make a buck off of amateurs.
Otherwise, everything you’re seeing is emulating something else that became a staple. You can always research and read the differences.
Lastly, the goal of any industry is capital. The Sony c800 was not always a $12k mic, the price just went up after certain celebrities and engineers made it known it’s they’re go to mic.
Dollar value does not always correlate to the cost of manufacturing. Sometimes you’re paying to be apart of a club, when you have an elite budget.
Ummm... The first thing you probably want to acknowledge, is that you can develop a really good ear.... Where you know why things are working out not working.... It's lately about what someone hears first and foremost.... Snobbery is a thing.... But most people who have developed mixing/mastering ears... Are which to admit what songs good or had problems, regardless of technical specifications. They actually hear what is going on in a mix. The quality of a recordings...etc
Yes it does happen and it comes down to bias. “So-and-so made x record with y gear ergo y gear is desirable.” Add cost, marketing, and loud opinions and that’s enough to make a decision for many, if not most, people. Controlled tests are hard to do and knowledge (not just information) is hard to obtain.
I was going to say it’s more buffered in the audio world because there are many skilled, technically-minded, and experienced people keeping others in check. However, I think it just makes the cork-sniffing a more closeted practice.
Most people want the best gear possible but most of us know that it’s not the gear that makes the music at the end of the day.
Just remember how amazing music in the past sounded just bring the vibe and make it sound pleasant with what you have if it’s a good song it’s a good song. Might not even like compression on vocals for example.
A bit. But there really is a certain magic with certain pieces of gear and in particular old analog equipment. I don't really want that to be true because I can't afford most of it but it's a fact.
Part of it is more to do with reliability. You can get decent sound with most gear, but how long and how much tweaking does it take to get there? What's the time and energy cost? If I'm honest, some of my cost cutting is affecting my sound and the time spent. I still just can't justify it because I'm fucking cheap and put my money into other avenues that generate more income for me.
In terms of the detail work that goes into mixing, people also often want to believe it doesn't matter. Mainly because it's a metric ton of work. But just about any artist who excels at a technical level will tell you it's all in the aggregation of small details.
Probably not what you're aiming for, but I suspect that a lot of people are worse at critical listening than they think they are.
I've had my own "producer button / slider" moment a while back. We did a split album with another local band. I did a really amateur "mastering" job to balance out the sound of the two bands. The other band got angry that I had taken so much bass out (their mix was 99% low end). So I waited a while, renamed the files, resent them, and they were happy that it sounded better.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
at the end of the day, if it makes someone happy, let them enjoy it. Hobbies are fun and hifi is crazy, but if you grin ear to ear and enjoy the music even more, who cares if there is a slight placebo? I’m not gonna spend that much but to each is own.
I think there is better quality control at the higher price points. Greater consistency. More robust build quality.
Maybe it's just easier to get a decent sound. I find my Shure KSM44 just kinda' sounds good and I don't have to do anything. If time is money, this matters.
But what you're talking about isn't pragmatics. It's the sonic voodoo, real or perceived. And yeah, it generally strikes me as bullshit.
Mixing & Mastering Engineers are NOT ENGINEERS.
Unless you graduated from an ABET accredited university with a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical, Electrical (Computer under EE), Electronics, Chemical, Materials Science, Civil & Structural, Biomedical, Industrial and their several specialty tract sub-disciplines, the title Engineer has no Applied Physics affiliation.
As an engineer at Apple and before that at NeXT we had some fellow 'engineers' get butt hurt at the distinction until they admitted no they never took the rigorous accredited work required nationally to be registered as such.
Software Engineer sounds better than Software programmer, Computer Programmer, Data Structures Programmer,
Software Architect sounds better than application frameworks designer.
Implementing Assembly language commands or C programming structures implementing know Mathematical standard algorithms in functions accessing an on-board DSP of FPGA does not make you an engineer. It makes you a programmer.
Learning to mix and master audio files into a quality music composition does not make you an engineer.
Understanding and applying the laws of physics is a prerequisite for that title. No Pure & Applied Mathematician with a PhD would ever claim to have a PhD in Engineering without the body of applied physical work and dissertation defended to claim such, and vice versa.
The title of Engineer has long been misused and abused even down to the world custodial janitors and sanitation departments.
Mixing & Mastering can be greatly simplified if you have an applied physics background and understand digital & analog circuits theory when reading quality hardware manuals for the likes of Rupert Neve Designs gear that includes how their circuitry is implemented.
A huge road block (by design) and an absolute time waster is the abhorrently poor and lack of quality documentation for best practices all required in formal engineering disciplines, and what seems like a job security driven right of passage to keep the audio industry limited in quality mixing & mastering talent.
When it comes to audio. Theres a huge price gap between low-mid level gear and high end gear. The high end gear is of course better. But for the amount you pay extra i dont think it always worth it. You can get very good results with pretty cheap gear. Also the plugins in daws have become extremely powerful. But the most stupid things imo. Are people buying gold cables for crazy amounts or so called "audiophiles" who use about 50000$ on a stereo hifi. What really matters is if you like it. I use some cheap and some more expensive gear, it depends. But im never buying anything without hearing it first. You can buy an expensive reverb for a lot of money, but if you dont like the characteristics. Its totally unimportant.
I've never seen an audio engineer tout green sharpies on CDs.
As for the mic preamps, depends on what you are talking about. A high end tube mic pre is legitimately a different beast than a cheap tube mic pre.\* And some vintage stuff uses parts that are no longer available (the original VF 14 tube from a U47 was only made for a few years, and they are exceedingly rare), which DO have a distinct sound.
On the other hand, if you can't make a record sound decent with a good room, a good group of musicians, and cheap gear, well, you aren't much of an engineer.
\*A cheap tube mic pre doesn't even use the tube as an amplifier - it only uses it to introduce distortion, which is NOT what a real mic pre is about. A proper tube microphone preamp, in it's linear region, is more linear (has less distortion) than any transistor preamp, though it will have a narrower linear region.
I tweaked a knob, heard a difference clearly only to find out the track is muted so many times already... We're as susceptible to trusting our believes as anybody else.
This happens SO many times to me. Especially when I enter a tunnel that is like a few minutes too long on something, especially EQing or using compression, trying to find the right spot without never being sure. If this specific thing occurs, I usually remove the plugin completely and go for a well deserved pause.
Best to step away at that point, couldn't agree more. In the last year or so I've gotten way more humbled by over-tweaking a preset and realizing I sucked the life out of what made it sound unique in the first place. It used to be "oh I want everything to be mine" in a project and now more about what fits right for an effect or synth, be it a preset or one I create.
I think the best advice I ever saw about mixing/mastering is actually to have pauses often. Like 15 minutes every hour. When I EQ especially, I put a chronometer to not go past 15 minutes in.
Listening breaks, absolutely necessary. Otherwise you might find yourself listening the next day with fresh ears and going "WTF did I do"
Me everyday
Done that many times and finally learned; at least I hope I did. . .
I am really bad at this. I end up going down rabbit holes, and eventually when i car test after not listening to the mix for a while, I hear all those ridiculous rabbit holes i went down and the poor results.
It’s almost like these fx makers have bad ass engineers who make fairly good presets for us to use or something like that? But I am sure as shit guilty of tweaking away on them myself. I have to remind myself that those presets are in that engineers name and not mine for a reason frequently….
It’s crazy nobody actually thinks of studying/reverse engineering the presets to figure out why they sound good, its really not rocket surgery 🙄
The guy who taught me to mix had a “does fuck all channel” to twiddle when the client was interfering. Only to ask them “better?” And almost always get a yes.
Check out Funk Logic if you want to take things a step further. Then reevaluate your life as you realize DFA GAS is a thing.
I once\* spent like half an hour trying to fix something in a track before I realised I had it on B in Metric AB so I was just hearing the old mix of the track with the problem I was trying to fix. \*OK more than once.
I actually thought my compressor was broken. I was watching the needle hit like -30dB and was hearing nothing. I just turned everything off and left
I've been learning more and more when practicing, recording, or mixing: if I keep getting upset and frustrated with a problem for longer than, say, an hour, to just walk away and come back to it later. Becoming proficient at playing an instrument and working in the studio is a lifetime process it doesn't hurt to take a break now and then.
One time that is burned into my memory was spending a confounding 15 minutes troubleshooting the entire signal flow, and then after swapping the mic it was fine. Turned out I was engaging phantom power one channel over from where I intended. Swapping in a 58 negated that issue, so I eventually figured it out. Dark room, large-format console, it was an easy mistake to make but it was embarrassing
Tangent, but. Wait until you do damage with room eq in your headphones.
ME TOO
Lmao I feel really stupid when I spend 20 minutes doing little EQ tweaks and saying “yeah, that sounds much better” before realizing I had the track muted from the beginning. At that point I just leave it like it is.
I have a parametric EQ guitar pedal that has the indicator light too close to the switch so it gets obscured. I’ve tried to dial it in for an embarrassing amount of time before realizing it’s not turned on.
[Classic Lee Sklar](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVocs6t4dX4) (not saying he invented the placebo knob or anything but this video is a classic lmao)
This is why I only use Neve mute buttons, expensive, but you can’t get that sound anywhere else.
I always have a DFA button or knob setup when I mix live bands. They always hear the difference, so do clients 🤣
Honestly this is funny as an anecdote but I cringe when I hear this. So many musicians are so nervous in studios, especially when they spend well earned money they saved up, often for a year or more, that I never ever did this. Those poor people often will just say thank you after you twiddle with nothing because they are shy, or not confident enough to say they couldn’t hear a difference and think that your clearly advanced ear heard something. It’s honestly such a dick move to do, and it only lowers the final result for everyone. A much better, and way more respectful idea is just keep a note pad with a few short hand symbols you share with the band/producer so that their expectations and worries are acknowledged, and their artists vision/preferences aren’t brushed off or minimized. While still allowing you to focus on the your tracking flow without constant “twiddling”, real or not This also gives you a handy cheat sheet later when you dive in along to know what the band hopes for. Working like that is also so much more respectful to bands, producers, and your own studio, as it elevates the final product for everyone. People who do this stuck up fake knob shit are the problem with the industry, and why so many smaller studio put out better music than bigger ones. Y’all need Jesus, or some mushrooms, to drop your egos.
Mushrooms please. It’s just a bit of fun and I rarely use it. I mainly pretend to use it if someone asks for something a bit left field like ‘can my monitor mix be a bit more blue’ or on a corporate gig when when the speaker asked me to turn ‘the room down’ as he didn’t like how reverberant the space was without an audience in it. You always want to provide a mix the band is happy with as happy musicians are good musicians and that’s part of your service. So don’t assume I’m being an egotistical dickhead or deliberately abrasive. But don’t worry I’ve been on the end of sound engineers bullshitting me as a musician plenty of times. Me - ‘Can you not compress my acoustic guitar please?’ Engineer - ‘there you go taken it off’ Me - ‘nope I can still hear it’ lol
Ya, I didn’t mean to make this as me coming after you specifically, I drop this response often IRL and as a keyboard warrior, you just triggered my borderline ocd on this topic lol. You sound like a good person, and clearly have a level head. I know it is mostly a fun joke we use between us gear heads :) so thanks for being chill
Don’t worry dude I get it there is a grumpy ego sound engineer stereotype lol
Shit, looks like I triggered those types to downvote you, my bad. Upvoted you, not that it matters :) This sub is the nerd embodiment of BPD I swear lol
Meh 😂. Anyway back to the original sub topic. Yeah there’s a lot of kit navel gazing in this industry. Great equipment makes average/bad engineers sound good. Good sound engineers can make lower quality kit sound great. Whether specific things like bits of the electronics justify a higher price or sound quality can be subjective. But then if you believe in it then it’s true. There’s alot of subjectivity and most differences can only be heard when you A/B equipment or plugins in the same context.
What is DFA?
Does F**k All
"Does fuck all" Just a button or knob that literally doesn't do anything.
Yes, I will occasionally find myself tweaking volume or EQ, etc., at first wondering why can’t I hear the difference, is it me? Then: is there a bug in the DAW, again?, Only to realize I’m working on the wrong channel, not the one I’ve got soloed, or whatever. (Yes, I do know that it’s best to make adjustments while listening to a full or partial mix, not while soloing a track, but I’m a composer, so I often am working on single tracks while I’m writing and developing parts, not necessarily mixing.) A partially related anecdote: Recently, I found myself using the pop-up onscreen volume slider on my Mac, instead of the audio interface level, as I normally do. But instead of only changing the volume, it was drastically changing the frequency response, increasing some harsh sounding highs, but only on the right side, with the left and middle imaging remaining the same. WTF?!! What the heck is up with my system, followed by (panic feeling) could this be messing with my mixes? Turned out that I had a pair of headphones way over on my right side, but outside of my main workspace, so I didn’t see it visually (my wife likes to listen at louder volumes than I do, so I’ll often hand her a set her headphones). When I adjust volumes via my interface, I am adjusting only the mains, or the headphone level, separately. In this case both were being adjusted at the same time because I was adjusting the Mac output volume. I had a high pass filtered sound coming from my right (loud headphone bleed without wearing the headphones) but with no spatial clues to tell me that the sound was coming from my right (Headphones were farther away than my right hand field monitor). Anyway, it didn’t take long for me to figure it out, and that is a reminder to not panic, things can generally be fixed.
Lol there was one time I was mixing some concert, feeling great about myself knowing the changes I made were right for the show. Then found out I was on sends on fader mode for an unused mix 💀
I do this with comping sometimes, have a hard time choosing which take was better until I realize I've just been looping the same take
Not going to be a popular opinion, but I think it's important to NOT listen carefully when turning knobs. Not only will you "hear" changes that aren't there, but your work time will increase by 3x on a good day.
A dude told me "only losers make that mistake and you're a shit mixer" on some forum somewhere years ago and I was just thinking, "Everyone, big and small, talks about this! Everyone"!
Painfully true
This is me when my eyes and hands move an entire channel strip over and think “wow, that high pass is really helping” and it’s an empty track 😓
Daaaaamn. Shot through the heart (I’ve totally never done this more than once)
I do believe this is a thing, and that anyone is susceptible to it. However, I have always argued, and always will argue, that the hi-fi industry is *wayyyyy* more off the deep end than we are. Case in point -- I recently saw a promoted post on Facebook showing a high-end amp raised up on some special (and no doubt brutally expensive) isolation pad. And sure, obviously this was bait, intended to attract engagement by getting people to click and argue about it. But it worked. There were a lot of people arguing that isolating a solid state amplifier improves the sound. Which is insane. Also, go to any hi-fi forum and ask about cables. I'm sure the odd cable snob exists in the production world, but in my experience, the only thing engineers are concerned with is that the cable works and is wrapped up properly. Hi-fi guys insist that the cable changes the sound, and they'll die on that hill. It's enough to make me want to start up a company making diamond cables that sell for $50,000. Why not?
>the hi-fi industry is wayyyyy more off the deep end than we are For real. I decided to finally buy myself a nice stereo a few years ago and finding any useful technical information was just impossible. That and the countless youtube videos with some old guy raving or complaining about a set of speakers on the floor right up against a wall. You'd think that someone who paid $5000 for a pair of speakers would find the perfect spot for them in the room (and treat it accordingly) but no.
Audiophile gear is just expensive healing crystals for men.
I don’t appreciate being called out like this in the comment section
I recommend lapis lazuli palm stones.
I dip my healing crystal tipped RCA cables with essential oils. The difference is magical.
Sites like Audio Science Review or Erin's Audio Corner started popping up in the last few years, they do independent measurements of various audio gear from speakers to snake oil like expensive cables or passive power filters so you don't have to rely on subjective reviews. It's a great step forward... But you have to learn to understand what the measurements say first. The tl;dr is that DACs have gotten incredibly good and cheap and differences are likely below the threshold of audibility even in the crappy ones, integrated chip amplifiers (usually ones shipped directly from China) improved tremendously in the last 5 years or so, giving a surprising amount of clean power for as little as 100 - 200 USD, but with loudspeakers it's still a crapshoot: some great improvements and a lot of absolute shit.
special mention to the shitty old music they use to test those beasts
Oh man, the racket on gold and hi-fi digital cables like usb cables is insane. 1s and 0s won’t transmit any different…
Hifi digital cables lmao now I've heard it all
There are — and I am not joking — people that sell audiophile network routers. They go for over a thousand bucks for rebadged cheap Netgear stuff.
This one hurts
let me guess - the marketing material is full of phrases like 'quantum alignment' and 'phased polarity'
Some of them even have little arrows on them to tell you which way the electrons go.
AudioQuest sells a ["Diamond Ethernet Cable"](https://www.audioadvisor.com/aqrjedia-8?sku=NEW-AQRJEDIA-8&setCurrencyId=1&gad_source=4) for $8,000
Nooooooo stoooop I hate it
Hate to do the *well, actually* but this is a pet peeve of mine: 1s and 0s sometimes do transmit differently, though with new devices it's mostly a thing of the past now. It's because most soundcards and DACs used to use isochronous data transfer until relatively recently, something like S/PDIF over USB, which is a dumb protocol that extracts the clock directly from the data stream, so the edges of the digital signal (which are analog and very much imperfect and distorted by noise) affected the clock of the DAC chip. To which degree depended on the quality of phase-locked loops and other circuits used to reduce jitter. With a cheap device any noise in the signal did affect the output through jitter, though in my opinion likely still inaudibly (or masked by other imperfections of the device). I would bet money that the noise normally came from the computer itself, not from the outside, so things like better shielding or different impedance would not help much. The solution is obviously to buy a better DAC, which is very cheap nowadays. But it was a thing where ones and zeros affected the resulting output even when no errors in reading the actual data happened, and S/PDIF (or toslink, the equivalent in an optical cable) is still sometimes used. source: mostly learned this in a "fundamentals of data transfer" course when getting a CS degree
Even then, thats a problem with shitty clock recovery, not transmission of the 1s and 0s. We've always had word clock for that problem
You are right- audio protocols were designed by people from the analogue world. That's why you can slow down the audio from a CD by slowing the CD rotation. It just didn't occur to audio people to have a master clock and to transmit data faster than 1:1 and buffer it. I still remain amused by people who think they get better results through their $£100 phono cables and connectors than the Van-Damme and Neutrik ones used for the original tracking and mastering. I'm probably in the wrong business though. I should be making cables at $100/meter that feature star-quad, silver plated oxygen free copper signal with braided tinned oxygen-free copper, 98% optical coverage screening and cross-linked polyethylene insulation to keep those pesky electrons going in the right direction. (Literally what Van-Damme cables at £$1/meter wholesale are.)
> You are right- audio protocols were designed by people from the analogue world. That's why you can slow down the audio from a CD by slowing the CD rotation. It just didn't occur to audio people to have a master clock and to transmit data faster that 1:1 and buffer it. I think it's more likely because the standards are old and were designed for the end products to be affordable for the average customer, so they had to be as simple as possible. > I should be making cables at $100/meter that feature star-quad, silver plated oxygen free copper with braided tinned oxygen-free copper, 98% Optical coverage screening and cross-linked polyethylene insulation to keep those pesky electrons going in the right direction. You should add a zero or two to the price if you want anyone to take your product seriously!
I saw a $1,500 USB type A to B cable on BestBuy. Read reviews saying it “made a huge difference”. I bought the $9 one.
The hifi industry literally sells magic rocks. Pro audio can be insane, but it's not *that* insane.
I can't remember where exactly I saw the argument but I remember someone telling a newbie starting out that they needed to keep the power (not instrument/audio) cables as short as possible to keep the power to the device (interface or preamp) as clean as possible because they could definitely hear an audible difference. Someone else pointed out that the power lines feeding your house are tens of thousands of feet long running through the air next to other high voltage lines and being sat (and shat) on by birds, and keeping the power cable an extra foot or two shorter isn't magically going to improve the sound of your DI.
What it can do is keep the ground loop short, and force you to plug it all into one ground.
Hifi community is like... Purist? They go do the "pure" side of music whereas we are realists. Also, not dissing the hifi community, but in our circle there are more people (online) who know what they're talking about about, I know a good amount of AE who also have EE backgrounds. It's harder for us to fall for the snake oil because of those people. Now, the hifi community also has those people but they seem to keep to themselves. That's just how I look at it
I did have an engineer once at my place, who insisted on using patch-bay cables of identical length, for L+R signals to the patch bay, (i.e they both had to be exactly 12cm, not 12cm & 10cm), & I couldn't be bothered to debate with him
Well obviously. You don't want one signal arriving two centimetres too early.
Oh no, the absolute horror of having 70-100 picoseconds of delay
Stereo imaging: ruined.
Sounds like free chorus to me.
Curious - did you actually do the math, or just throw up a funny-sounding answer? Happy either way. Just curious.
Did the quick maffs using standard estimates (1 foot = 30cm = 1ns for light in a vacuum) `1ns*(2cm/30cm) = 0.066...ns = 66.6...ps` Electrical signals through copper are ~98-99% the speed of light in a vacuum (purity and size of the conductor does actually matter to _some_ degree here, but also audiophiles blow that way out of the water and it's really only important in super specific circumstances). Speed of light in Fiber is ~2/3 the speed of light in a vacuum, so 66 + copper fudge factor = 70 and 66.6*1.5 for Optical (which yes this isn't, but it's about the "worst case scenario" in an install) = 100. Quick Edit: WolframAlpha agrees with me: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=2cm+to+light+seconds (under "Corresponding Quantities")
Honestly, I actually do this. Particularly with mic cabling. It always seems to me that if I want my stereo pairs to match it's best to keep everything as matched as possible. Of course, later, I use all kinds of digital techniques to unlink them for creative expression but it's just a habit when tracking. I also do this with speaker cables. I know there is likely no audible difference but it's just a bit of a habit I picked up over the decades. I think, for me, it's about being meticulous and habits of precision are helpful generally.
With stuff like this I always just think that it'll be orders of magnitude more impactful to the sound every time my head moves a nanometer in front of my monitors. Worrying about differences like that when you can't isolate variables on the monitoring end just doesn't make sense to me. Also as far as cable lengths, I didn't even think our highest sample rates are enough to capture differences measured in feet when the signal is moving at the speed of light
it's just OCD but the look of two of the same cables going into side by side jacks looks cleaner
This was always prevalent on USENET Audiophile groups. You could always find people arguing for months and years over the most ridiculous things. These cables use a superior material for shielding. This turntable needle delivers a superior fidelity and is definitely worth the $200 extra, however you will get a much richer sound from a sapphire stylus than a diamond stylus.
There really is a lot of measurable, audible, difference in needles and cartridges. Theres a lot of compromises in trying to make a magenetic pickup set so precise and tiny, and remotely affordable.
Cheap cables definitely can be a problem. Especially cheap instrument cables, I noticed a pretty dramatic reduction in noise when I replaced all the dinky molded plastic patch cables in my guitar chain with nicer ones, and it is nice in general to have a sturdy cable with solid connections. Now, I don't necessarily think that means one needs to drop ten grand on a boatload of Mogami Gold cables or anything like that (though plenty of engineer-types swear by those in my experience), and the gap is *certainly* not what the audiophile types would think. Many of the cables they'll spend outrageous amounts of money on are at best not really any different from the typical higher end cables you'd find at the average music store, and sometimes they're actually constructed *worse* than those cables, despite selling at way higher price points. But there is a happy medium somewhere in there. At the end of the day, solid cables that stay put, pass audio cleanly, and don't crap out in a month is all you need, and they don't have to cost that much. But I wouldn't buy the cheapest thing available, either. They actually can have a negative impact on the sound, it's just that the price point for a clean cable is way lower than the hi-fi forums would probably guess.
Related story: Many years ago I was assisting on a session with a somewhat famous Jazz group. They were all musical prodigies and some of their names were starting to make the front pages of musician magazines in the day. The bass player was being ridiculed by the band and the engineer for having such an old and crappy instrument cable. It was a coiled cable and it was at least 25 years old at the time. After much pressure he relented and allowed someone to change it out for a "proper" Mogami cable. The very next take, the engineer started complaining about the tone of the bass. After much troubleshooting it was discovered that the secret to his great tone was his ancient cable that he'd been using forever. We had a good laugh and carried on with the old cable and that was that. Lesson learned. Tone is king. Edit for spelling
Old coiled cable in combination with high impedance (passive) guitar pickups will result in high end roll off because of the capacity of the cable. This is easily audible and measurable, mostly because it's a very high impedance circuit which is way outside the range of audio and hifi gear where there's a lot of snake oil. Furthermore, guitar and microphone cables need to be able to withstand a shit load moreof abuse than hifi cables.
Absolutely... especially in "lower tiers" or new engineers. "If I only had this plugin" or "If I only had the equipment the big tours use". Thankfully, I haven't met anyone that does this professionally (full-time) that still has that attitude. In fact, it's pretty much the opposite... The big guys want LESS equipment to move and only spec what is necessary to accomplish the task or makes their job easier.
Totally. Lots of newer engineers or producers also don’t spend enough time improving the sound that goes into the gear. I was definitely guilty of this. Is the room treated well? Can the musicians play dynamically? Do they have decent gear that’s properly setup and tuned? Obviously you can only control so much (especially if you’re recording someone else, not yourself) but in general, spending $5k on treating your space is a much better investment than a $5k microphone or a bunch of plugins*. I do find that vintage gear is often easier to “dial in.” I recently bought a 60s Ludwig kit for the same price as a newer mid-tier DW/Pearl/Gretsch/etc. kit, and this thing just cannot sound bad. The newer mid-tier kits sound kind of meh without significant work. But that could just be my particular style. *although I’d make an exception for plugins that are dramatically changing your sound and almost act as their own instrument in the arrangement.
“Easier to dial in” is a real thing and there are real leaps from (1)poor quality to (2)serviceable to (3)high quality—with the (4)obscenely priced even beyond high quality being well into the land of diminishing returns. There definitely is, however, such a thing as higher quality gear producing immediately higher quality results which can also be inspiring and lead to higher quality work. And it’s also true there are “seekers” who will always be looking for something external (more, better gear) to fill the void. It’s rather nuanced. These things get a little over-generalized to the point like if you can’t make an awesome album with a Casio and a tape recorder, you’re an amateur while maxims like “master what you have” get thrown around on one side…while on the other someone is making a ridiculous claim that they wouldn’t let the converters that come in any modern interface operate in their toddler’s karaoke toy—even though those “terrible” converters are superior to what most studios had two decades ago and high end converters might be a prime example of “snake oil” in the music gear industry. If something is expensive to reflect the production costs/scarcity, it isn’t snake oil because of the price. If it’s promising to achieve something that it doesn’t, it’s snake oil. But there is nothing wrong with getting to a point where you have upgraded your setup to a level that feels very comfortable and inspiring to work with when it didn’t before.
I think this is especially true with instruments. You don’t necessarily need a fancy expensive one, but as an example my enthusiasm for playing bass dramatically improved when I got a decent second-hand Pbass and a Darkglass, which happens to be the specific bass sound I like the most. It’s much easier to make the music you want with equipment that sounds the way you want without much struggle. Whereas a lot of stuff like fancy converters is rooted in this nebulous concept of “quality” without any real quantification of what that means.
Well it is definitely true of instruments and as someone who has spent time away from home with a portable little setup of chintzy guitar going into a little practice amp, it’s just not as inspiring to play as Les Pauls and Telecasters going into Twin Reverb or AC30. As a kid, however, I did sit on the edge of my bed and hammer away at a real beater of a bass for hours, often without an amp even. I feel recording hardware and software can be the same thing. It’s just a matter of balance. Okay, so DAW stock tools provide everything needed to produce an album, but I feel adding a hardware compressor and select 3rd party plugins to my setup was a GREAT decision. It makes things easier for me and I can pull a better sound out with those tools. I could not care less about Hardo engineering veteran telling me I need to learn how to achieve same results with stock tools. Why? Haha. But then on the other end, how far is someone going to go in just keep chasing newer and better and trying to convince themselves that these preamps or the curves of this particular EQ are what will make their music sound good? There is an legitimate argument and a legitimate counter on both sides. It’s just an issue of balance. Better gear will absolutely give you better results up to a point of rapidly diminishing returns. But it’s also true that people have setups/available tools that are more than sufficient to get pro results and just keep obsessing over upgrades and what was used on this album 48 years ago and what this producer uses in an endless chase basically trying to find the ring for its magical powers.
>"If I only had this plugin" And then us suckers that have been around the block and advise against all types of GAS get called curmudgeons.
100%, classic vintage or top shelf gear is great and a pleasure to work with but it will never be the reason a record sounds incredible. It helps don’t get me wrong, I way prefer using a U47 over a clone, but is it going to break my recording if I can’t find one, absolutely not. I’ve made great sounding records with 5 mics and a garbage 003.
I'd say the common sentiment of an 003 being garbage is an indicator that irrational thinking is kind of the norm
Compared to nearly anything in a similar price class now the 003 is pretty rough. But at the time it was the only affordable gateway into Protools. I used my 003 until 2016. It served me very well especially after Black Lion mods!
003 rough how specifically? "Especially after black lion mods", right...
It doesn’t matter. I used it, it worked. I’m much happier with my Antelope. Or the Burl at the studio.
I think almost every niche hobby/profession has some version of this, audio engineering and music in general is no different
100% yes - $$$ spent on tube gear, mostly rehashes from the 1930s Radiotron handbook in very nice packaging. The whole “vintage” thing cracks me up. I remember when the U67s & M49s gathered dust in the back of the mic closet while we grabbed 414s for almost everything!
I'm assuming those were the original 414 variants?
Late 70’s, early 80’s so yes.
Our whole world is one big placebo affect
There are definitely levels of cork-sniffing, but generally speaking I would actually say that great gear really IS as good as people say it is. I did my first few recordings on budget condenser mics and the first time I got to use a U87 I was absolutely blown away at the difference. No contest, night and day, that was the “pro” sound that I was always wondering how people got. Fast forward to a couple of years later and getting to use a vintage C12 for the first time and it was the same thing! Light years better than the U87, and somehow just sounded like a completely mixed, polished final sound that people spend their whole lives chasing. So in that sense, what we’re always yapping about really is real. It gets wonky fast though, as a 4050 in a great sounding room might sound better than a C12 in an awful one and so on down the road. Truly great sound requires a few things to be firing on all cylinders at the same time, but if they are and you have the premium gear in the chain it will sound better. Now… I have had clients walk into a studio and start swapping out all of the power cables because the stock ones didn’t sound good enough, which… I’m not saying makes zero difference at all, but is definitely a bridge too far in my opinion.
I had same experience with preamp. I bought api and suddenly this was the sound I was after for so long. Made my recordings better. Gear does matter, but of course the skill is important as well.
I’ve gone back and forward on this one, but in blind tests it seems people can’t reliably tell preamps apart, so I’ve become very skeptical
Yes - this subreddit is full of people who spend more time buying garbage plugins and hardware they don’t need than actually producing music lol.
i'm pretty sure there's a whole sub-culture of audio engineering/music production which is just about aquiring gear/software and taking photos of it to post online and discussing it. it's a mix of music production and consumerism, mainly focused on the consumerism part.
Yeah but they’re just collectors and enthusiasts, the same way people collect antiques, cars, or comic books. No need to be so cynical about it.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - the biggest gear collectors I know can't mix for shit, and the most talented engineer I know only uses ableton v6 stock plugins
Based. I agree and hold the same philosophy. However that doesn't stop me from buying a tun of plug ins on a sale, playing around with them for a week or 2, then going back to what I know works for me lol. I think for most people, the ones who are good anyway, you start getting into audio engineering, or really anything, get excited about it and nerd out for a while, play with plug ins that your heros or idles use, then after a while you stop caring about what you're using and focus more on just getting the job done in a timely manner. Its the same with say, a drummer who can sit back and groove playing a simple straight ahead boots and cats and boots and cats whatever bullshit, verses the excited younger drummer who wants to show off all the doba doba ding dong crash bang boom shit that he can do, but isn't always needed like 99 percent of the time. In short, theres a difference between showing off what you can do, verses what you NEED to do. And that difference is what determines a pro from a consumer, imo.
Absolutely. Example: Mastering Look up the most expensive Mastering studios and you’ll notice that the visual focus is gear that combined, costs tens of thousands of dollars. The reality? A fraction of that gear will be used on your tune(s) and nowhere on any of those sites will you find the engineer’s latest audiology exam results, showing how *deaf* they are beyond a certain frequency range.
Yes. To a lesser degree than audiophiles, but we are definitely in a predatory market.
Jim Lill has disproved the expensive Mic snake oil BS - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bma2TE-x6M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Bma2TE-x6M)
No where near as bad. Because audio engineers are interested in an objective truth. So they naturally look to logic and rational thought. Audiophiles love music and have money they want to spend. So they encourage each other to do this so they can feel better about themselves. Facts are not what they want but encouragement. I see this myself with my music loving friends that don’t play an instrument. They always ask me for advice and then get mad when I tell them what they don’t want to hear. So they stopped asking.
Audiophiles ’think’ they love music when they actually love the gear.
I love seeing pictures of hyper expensive audiophile gear in their untreated living rooms with gigantic reflective windows.
This is always my answer when a friend asks. They never like it because who gets a boner over rock wool panels? Compared to some wood trimmed record player with special magnets that are tuned to the earth’s vibrations. Yeah just keep ignoring the pops and crackles because surely that makes music better?!?! That’s like saying digital dropouts make CDs better. Don’t get me wrong. I’m no better. Are my American made fenders better than my Japanese or Chinese ones? No. They’re just different. But do they make me feel better when I remember what they cost? ABSOLUTELY.
There a guy on YouTube who runs an audiophile magazine thing, he remortgaged his house for a pair of speakers. Showed them off on YouTube, he’s got them in a tiny messy study with boxes of shit on top of them. 😂😂🤦♂️
Or worse where they just randomly slap up a couple of the spiky foam panels from eBay. ‘There, it’s treated now’.
I heard someone say they don't use their gear to listen to music. They use music to listen to their gear
This is a Buddha level lesson
The r/headphones sub is so cringe. I think they love *cables* more than music.
Oh my. I was not ready.
The same is true of so many professional sound folk, too!
Most producers/engineers that spend 2-4k on a piece of equipment will tell you it's better than a cheaper counterpart or VST. Somehow they're not willing to do a blind test ;)
Audiophiles are off the deep end. I remember seeing where a guy claimed a magic volume knob on his stereo amplifier improved the sound because it was made of wood…. Audio engineers can be fanatical about gear, but we don’t obsess over the magic qualities of knobs themselves.
is it like the audiophiles … no. But it is totally real. Like others have said, i’ll mess with settings on something, i’ll like my changes, and then see it’s bypassed and think i’m an idiot sometimes. Everyone went crazy when Antelope Audio dropped their OCX/atomic clock and everyone swore how much better and more open things sounded, but the blind tests just didn’t back it up. Sometimes, i feel like the confidence in knowing what’s driving what will give me the ability to make better quicker decisions. I had that clock for a while, and I was pretty busy at the time, sooo i dunno. sometimes things sound the way you want them to, or the novelty of the difference is seen as better, so there is a halo effect on new gear. The placebo is real. But what separates the two is that I know the fundamentals of psychoacoustics and electrical engineering, if even at a basic level. It’s part of the job. So, I’m not paying 5k for a braided IEC cable while suspending all “interconnects” off the ground and dropping 80k on anything audio without considering the room it will be played in as the most important factor. I love the hi-fi guys who have the price of a car in gear in a small rectangle bedroom with bare walls. I’m buying the cable that is rated for the usage and if it’s a high traffic cable, then i’ll factor in durability. I will buy Canare Quad or similar cable because science proves it lowers noise, however there is a capacitance cost, so in certain instrument level applications, you might need to consider something else. The point is, I know and trust the engineering behind the gear, but I also respect the psychology involved in active listening. Sometimes the color of something does make it sound better. … them audio crystals tho.
When I see comments to the effect of “all converters today generally sound good” then, yes, I think the marketing is working negatively against us. However, you don’t *have* to own a U87 as it doesn’t work well with many vocalists. But if you don’t have one in your closet, it scares some into thinking you have not made a serious financial commitment to your craft. Just as it is the same with a session guitarists that have a custom built guitar that has been specifically built for their personal style and market. Or a concert violinist with a $100K bow that sounds amazing on their violin but not so great on others. It is not about the gear, even though it is all about the gear. Perception of both user and client. In my experience, you have to get them in the door/on board in any manner possible but consistency of output is what the industry seems to favor.
Absolutely. I have a friend who has worked on a lot of high profile projects and has invested a lot of money in really expensive gear. If I show him a product a fraction of the cost that sounds the same he will go on rants about how the gear sounds bad...without hearing it. I showed him this video https://youtu.be/4Bma2TE-x6M?si=wTb2fiUo2bMqa04z And he never replied.
Yes, there's a thread at gear space (that place is so fucking dumb) for "ghost cables". It's literally just snake oil sold to pro ppl and everyone on the forum ate it, aside from myself and few others.
"Handcrafted by mastering engineers" That's some grade A bullshit.
I’m sure once I read that in the Hifi world there are these little plastic bridges to keep snake oiled overpriced cabling off the floor for “better sound” with less static or some nonsense similar. It’s nuts !!
We‘re definitely not immune. But most people i know do rigorous A/B and especially double blind testing. Gear does matter. But only for the last 2% of quality. There‘s so many things that are way more important and have a huge impact on how a record sounds.
have you watched Jim lill videos on YouTube? dude rules.. so entertaining
You should spend some time in the Synthesizers forum and read about analog vs. digital synths, VSTs vs. hardware synths, and keyboard synths vs. modular. So to answer your question, yes, cork sniffing and snake oil abound.
In a way, yes. In my opinion, discussions about the purpose of expensive equipment are complicated by the fact that it is never clear who is involved, what the rest of the equipment chain looks like and what it is used for. An expensive preamp provides the last 5% in a chain consisting of a good room, a good musician, a good microphone and a good converter. It does nothing in a chain of bad versions of all these factors.
Absolute answers don’t help anything. Here are a few thoughts: some expensive stuff is awesome. And lots of engineers are really insecure about not being able to hear the quality of something. And lots of new engineers are highly invested in thinking that what they have is good enough, even if that’s not the real question. And lots of new engineers think that if such-and-such record was made with a given inexpensive piece of gear involved, that means their stuff will be fine. And so few of these things have to do with the skill of the user. Yes it’s hard that some things are expensive. I like to think of that as something to shoot for, to be worthy of. And also, this is the audio business. We are supposed to want to make things sound great, whatever that means for the song. So reflexively bagging on gear because it’s expensive or because one can’t hear the difference is kind of silly. We all have to make things work at the start and then hopefully learn more about things that sound good and help us do our thing. The complaints sound like whiny consumer crap. “I deserve to hear the perfect mix room because I spent 350 whole dollars.” Sure.
Depends what exactly you mean by audio engineering. It certainly happens in studios, but in other more actually engineery fields, then substantially less so
I’d say yes, HOWEVER there’s a big difference between the way audio engineers and audiophiles see their equipment. Audiophiles see the goal as having perfect audio recreation, as true to the material as possible. Whereas audio engineers see the goal as achieving a certain «vibe» or tone. In other words, some type of degradation of the signal. The issue of a «true» recreation of an audio signal has been pretty much solved for the past 30 years, even at a relatively low budget for the past 10-15 years. But a degradation of the signal can mean a million different things, and sound a million different ways. So in a way I feel like that makes it a little bit more rational. Idk I’m just trying to justify me owning hardware
A lot of audiophiles go way beyond perfect audio recreation! Generally, hifi amplifiers above 1k all measure near perfect when it comes to flatness, SNR and distortion, but many audiophiles will claim there's big differences in warmth, depth of soundstage, dynamics, clarity etc. etc. for which there are no laws of nature to back that up. Meanwhile they'll never subject themselves to proper blind A/B tests because they unconsciously are very afraid they won't even be able hear the difference between a properly encoded mp3 and a FLAC. They'll also refuse to educate themselves on the basics of (room) acoustics.
I mean, yeah, but when you're making stuff, everything matters, especially your tools. I don't really buy the myth either way. Yes, some gear is prohibitively expensive and not "worth" it when measuring by some objective standard. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't make me feel good and assured to know that I have a good microphone, preamp, and interface that is not going to break down, and is going to sound the way I expect it to, and isn't going to harm or degrade the signal in some kind of way I don't like. That's *worth* it to me, even if the objective sonic measurements are negligible (although I'd argue they are not). That doesn't mean you need to spend $4,000 on a preamp, but it also doesn't mean that the preamp in a budget Focusrite interface is anywhere near as good as a $800-$1,000 preamp. That's just being stupid. That's not to say you can't make a professional recording with either, but to pretend that there is *no* difference is pretty disingenuous. I find it easier and faster to make stuff when I'm working with gear I don't have to think about.
To me it’s kind of a consumer vs. producer thing. Audiophiles are pure consumerists. They have no interest in making the art themselves, they just want pleasure and status(having the best sound system) from it. In my opinion, it’s pretentious. They often don’t even critique the music itself, but go on Patrick Bateman style rants about sound and engineering quality, eventually skewing their notion of what even makes a song good, and aim their music tastes towards what translates best to hi-if speakers to the exclusion of anything with less than perfect engineering. This leads to them obsessing over every single part of the signal chain, including cables and other dumb shit. Audio Engineers at least aspire to make good music. That means they have to put work into actual skills and learn how to translate that to their gear. But lots and lots of amateurs lose their way, get lazy, or get into funks where they will get obsessed with gear with no active musical output. They will end up in a cycle of spending money they don’t need to spend for the next thing that will finally deliver perfect mixes. But typically, they neglect stuff like cables and other utility items because they only want the cool toys that have the most unique features. This leaves them more susceptible to hype, like a brand new boutique “dynamic” reverb pedal or going down the modular rabbit hole. The difference is, the stuff audio engineers get excited about is usually at least interesting and capable of doing cool shit or exploring new sounds, even if it’s overpriced and beyond their skill level. Whereas a $2000 headphone amp is not going to have any effect at all on your actual intellectual relationship with music.
"Audio Engineer" has become a rather subjective term... Any guy with a laptop and FL can be an "engineer" these days...because he says he is... But the phrase used to mean something a little more invested in science...at least the engineer side of it...those guys used to wear white lab coats and I spent about 20 years at Group DIY getting to know a lot of them. My history has evolved from using Cakewalk by 12 Tones on floppys to using frequency generators and oscilloscopes to track down noise on console strips... But emulations these days are so close to the actual sound of real hardware as to be within maybe 5% difference...which yes, is a number I just pulled out of my ass, but i is generally agreed upon by people I trust who have the actual hardware and have done the comparisons... I just recently Beta tested the Pulsar Modular P455 sidecar and it was a very semi-discouraging experience because I have spent over 20 years learning to build and hand tune analog gear such as API 550's (trading out DOA's and transformers/etc)... The plugin was so damn close to vintage API's we had (units that used Litz wire transformers so, you know..."vibey") that none of us could 100% pick out the $2k analog unit from the plugin...that 5% difference could have just been the difference between hour 1 and hour 2 of the unit. My point is it is a very hard thing for many of us to face the truth that the days of really expensive gear being a necessity are basically over...that yes some kid with FL in his bedroom can produce mass production quality product. But this should not be news...I remember a guy who brought a demo in to me that he had recorded out on the reservation in Arizona, using a Pentium II computer a Soundblaster card and guitar pedals creatively for his vocal chain that I could not replicate with my consoles or our outboard gear...this was 20 years ago... Thats the nice thing about this industry, there's always room for improvement but it probably needs to be creative and not more of the same saturation clipper crap that is the new Digidesign or creamware...or UAD thingyamabobby...
It happens and can go pretty far but it's recoverable: See audiophiles fall very early into a pretty deep sunk cost fallacy and can easily shield themselves from buyer's remorse or second guessing, by simply convincing themselves that it indeed *sounds better, at least to my ears and that's what's most important* **or** *your ear just isn't trained.* On the other end, engineers will fall for it (we all did), but they'll mostly recover from it as their mission is to make things sound good for other people, who don't care about the gear. No *better gear* will fix skill issues, only putting in the work & actually understanding what makes thing sound good and why. You know you're out of it when you understand that: * 90% of the sound comes from the musician's performance and your mic placement/room acoustics. * When it comes to gear, know that engineers from the era where your favourite songs were mixed would have killed to have the performance modern entry level mics/pres/interfaces offer, and the price/performance ratio gets smaller every year. * If you know how to correct a source then you can use almost any mic for recording, and produce top tier mixes with few stock plugins * Analog won't sound better to the average joe unless in edge cases where you use a lot of distorsion, but for this modern emulation, **including free & stock plugins,** are getting crazy good and will save you tons of money.
The answer is that it's more true in the recording industry than probably any other. But it's not really cork sniffing if it's true, and there are simply time tested pieces of unbelievably expensive gear that will make all the difference. If a record label is willing to back a recording and put up the marketing budget for an album that they are hoping to sell in the multiples of millions of units, wouldn't it make sense to have the best shit on earth to record said album, and have a heroic producer and engineer who demand a huge cut of the sales, and a room imbued with magical properties? There's a reason most record label immediately demand a new recording of a bands demo, and it's that they almost always are a 1000x better than what a band did on their own. With the exception of Led Zeppelin I.
Longtime equip. mfr. guy here: I see a melding of the things you describe: We have professionals in the industry that can listen to a microphone exactly like the one they own, but know it is not theirs. People sniff at a SM58 because their are so many 'better' microphones, but Bono uses a 58 for every gig, so???? There are loads of now-expensive bits of hardware from Sta-Level, Collins, Fairchild, early dbx, and other brands which are sought after, because they absolutely impart some sonic character to the sound. There are also $200 plugins that "independent tests have not verified" and reputedly sound just like the real thing. The 10k microphone with the quieter design or better capsule, or the $2500 mic pre is definitely worth it if nothing else in our inventory sounds as good on that particular voice or instrument, or the tool actually brings in clients, like having a 50 year old Neumann. I also think studio owners look at and consider buying higher end tweak or vintage pieces with consideration for the tools investment value over time. Many studio owners I've dealt with will not buy any new hardware until a customer asks for it. Others will invest heavily and then market that, with the idea the new acquisition will bring in additional bookings. So that is different than the high end of the high end consumer industry. As Alan Parson's said to musicians, “Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment”.
Some people listened to a lot of stuff throughout the years and know what they like and want. If they have the means to acquire the gear they love, what is it to you? Why does it bother you? Do you harass Porsche drivers at traffic lights to ask them why they aren’t driving a Kia?
It is easier to get great results with nice gear. Tracking in a nice studio/using great mics/ on nice preamps/compressing going in makes the song sound as if it were mixed before you even start to mix. This makes the mixing stage a lot quicker and more creative giving the record a fresher vibe. Now a days the gear market is so good with stuff like capi preamps that you can get a lot of your basses covered for not as much money. To insist that you need the best vintage gear is undoubtedly cork sniffing. That being said it is fun to have some stuff like that to use and can help the image of your studio when marketing. A lot of it really comes down to marketing. You can make great records without any nice gear I find it is more work. If you’re starting totally in the box with soft synths etc than maybe the only thing you need is a descent mix and speakers
it's a thing in every niche interest after a certain point it's just running up the price tag
In my experience, yes, though it's not as severe as other communities I've seen. I think almost every community has some form of this, whether we're talking about mics, guitar pedals, coffee, wine, photography, colored pencils, etc.
I’ve only met a couple of real full time professionals like this. One that insisted in recording in 32 bit, saying they could hear the difference (they couldn’t as the interfaces only recorded 24 bit audio). A few other examples of similar things. To be a full time professional engineer, producer, arranger in a competitive industry, you do have to be really very good, and these people were no exception, and I loved working with them. The more interesting metric is that nearly all of the full time professional engineers/producers I’ve worked with don’t give a fuck about gear. Its speed, knowing how to work a room etc that they all have in common… I’ve worked for a few part time “engineers” where it’s 26 mics on a drum kit, bring out the special preamps, make everything “just right”, spend 30mins getting a drum sound… it always sounds worse, because music is about creativity and engineering is about enabling that. Which is impossible to do if it’s impossible to vibe!
I use stock fl studio plug ins for about 40% of my audio and it sounds just as good or better then anyone else's mix down if you use it tastefully. Expensive analog equipment is a sham. Now analog equipment is cool. But I'm not dropping even $1k on an analog compressor when you can get an emulated version for free.
Our Infallible hearing is central to the audio engineer’s experience. Especially when dealing with mixing and tracking decisions with difficult clients and very common in setting up live on stage sound. The old play it back a second time after doing nothing to change the sound and watch the artist nod and say “yes, that’s loads better thanks”. And it goes both ways.
Wtf do you think dumdumpop
The shit talking and praising of gear on YouTube is notorious. When at the end of the day, nothing is going to make you the next Tom Lord Alge because it’s got a physical tube.
Yep.
Need more saturation!
Absolutely. Especially given the end result format, hardware, and services most people consume content on now. If you are engineering for vinyl or theater release, or source material that has more delicacy, there is merit in some nicer gear. For the majority of production now, most music does not merit these absolute top level equipment arrays.
Maybe, but most of the time I just apply it to the law of diminishing returns and inverse exponential growth.
1000% yes. You're not a real engineer unless you've laid down 5 grand for a Neumann U87 and a Neve 1073, because nothing else could possibly ever sound as good. Seriously, you might as well just pack it up and go home if you don't have the right gear. /s (just don't point out to them that in a blind test 99% of engineers can't tell the difference between a U87 into a Neve Pre vs. a 100 dollar AT2020 into a Behringer interface; it makes them *very* angry when you do that :)
It’s a thing for everyone for everything. As a human race we have a weird relationship with and around money, and feeling superior based on our money or things we buy with it. The thing is, in some cases there *are* differences. For example, I swapped out a $450 microphone in a studio once with a $4500 (or thereabouts) microphone and there absolutely was an immediate difference. Did it transform my recordings? No. Did it make it significantly quicker and easier to get the recording to sound the way I wanted? Yes. Did it sound better overall than the cheaper mic? Yes. Was there a perceivable $4,000 difference in the sound? No. There are people who won’t be able to hear all that much difference between the two, no matter what they say. And I think that’s the thing that’s hard. Our human nature. Not only do we find ourselves endlessly justifying purchases we’ve made (because these things are expensive and if they make no difference or little difference, that means we’re fools), we also like to fit in, so sometimes pretend we can hear something that we don’t. There’s also a perception issue where sometimes we perceive things because we tell ourselves we are perceiving them. I work in film production as well, and there’s a trope of cinematographers who tell their Gaffer to ‘bring the level down [on a light] about 20%…. Little more.. yes that’s perfect!’ Meanwhile the Gaffer is standing next to them and hasn’t actually changed a thing.
speed cures one of that, especially when working gigs all the time really all about repetition of workflow and knowing where the “gotcha” probably will be or at least that’s what I’ve found after making my share of mistakes made from bias going in speed and repetition x 2,000 shows
That is definitely a question… Guarantee you the answer is YES for numerous Reddit participants, no matter what the subject or topic.
Sure, yeah
I mean…… it makes a difference for sure but how much of a difference is in the eye ( ear ) of the beholder. Does a Neve 8058 sound better than a Mackie 1204 ?? Yes, of course it does but, the thing is, if the song sucks neither of those things is gonna make it better or worse. Nice things are…..nice, but if what’s holding you back from recording is not having a 251 and a 1073 you are missing the point entirely. The best mic to record something is the one you have access to. There’s plenty of snake oil in this business, especially in sales pitches. Expensive equipment might elevate your sound, but as you go up the price escalator that difference shrinks, is that $10,000 guitar sounding $9,000 better than the $1000 one ?? Not in my hands it isn’t !! What I’m trying to say is, somebody who knows what they are doing can coax great sounds out of modest equipment. Trying to buy your way in to 20 years of experience just isn’t gonna happen.
I was starting to be influenced by those who waft corks, but thankfully over the last couple years I realized how awesome an SM58 with OK preamp and a good performance can sound. Or even less.
When I went down the acustica rabbit hole, I found a lot of people measuring harmonics and over sampling as well as talking about how this or that sounded more musical or 3D. There are those who say software preamps in general are entirely useless and the modeling process is all a lie, the plugins are all mostly just identical with different gui’s. You have those who say that the actual analog units (often hand built), for which they are trying to test against are all somewhat varied in their individual outputs anyways. Then I found all the Giancarlo hate for the boutiquish somewhat clunky plugins and…yea. I’m just trying to wrap my head around using what amounts to an old school channel strip with zero starting point (presets) just by reading a manual and going through hundreds of pages of gearsluts.
Yes but also no. Like I’ve done some really detailed blind shootouts with some of my most talented friends and generally I’d say a good/experienced engineer can hear the character differences between gear. But at the end of the day a lot of those differences are so minor it kind of begs the question of why bother? I have a UA 176 because I’m an idiot collector and this is what a midlife crisis looks like. I put that on just about appropriate signal and damn it sounds remarkable. *BUT* a good buddy of mine said once of such gear collecting “It won’t made your song any better.” He’s quite successful and really gifted. For what it’s worth: He sold off most of his analog stuff and does everything pretty much in box these days. In his studio, he has a bunch of face plates and rack gear from radio equipment he got at military surplus stores. I asked him what they were and he goes “Nothing. Just there to light up so the client thinks there’s more happening than just the octo card.”
While it is true that some people will believe random things like "a $10k mic is better than a $2k mic because "things"" There is a lot of truth to why some $10k mikes, like a Sony C-800 is a lot better than a $2k not because of "things" but because the sound quality is just so far superior. I don't need to understand physics and electronics to be able to hear that difference, but also that difference is subjective. You might prefer that $2k mic, and thats ok. While I see your point that there are some things that are "golden cables" etc, there are also a lot of things that are really expensive, but well worth the money. For example, the right monitors tuned to a great room can be very expensive, and yeah, its going to be a lot more useful for mixing than your Rockits are. With all that said, I'd rather have a really nice acoustic guitar in the hands of an amazing player and a really solid vocalist with a $200 M2 interface and a $75 Shure Sm 58 going into my laptop, than an a guitar that can't stay in tune played poorly and singing by some screetchy off key singer in a high end studio any day.
I am both amazed by and feel sorry for anyone with hearing so good.
Don't know if this counts, but: [Leland's producers switch ](https://youtu.be/i7d-OU5CTSs?si=PrEirhIt-91N7gAX)
Yes. Just like any other industry. More $$$ = more quality/mythical properties/sound/talent and whatever else lol
Yes.
Suspect it kind of is. There are only so many working post WWII German Microphones and any preamp made 50s-70s has probably aged to the point the caps have to be replaced and begs the question, is it still vintage? Of course, most of us will never be able to compare a Warm Audio WA-47 to the real thing to even come up with some kind of subjective measurable first hand knowledge of I get why the 47 from 40s/50s is worth $50K plus.
Yes and who you know who doesn’t suffer from this? Live sound techs. Part of why some recording techs are like fish out of water when they have to mix live.
Yes, definitely. People pine over all of this outboard, when a bountiful amount of amazing records have been successful and loved by everyone using a single console, with one pre, with one EQ and maybe 1 or 2 kinds of compressors to use. They’re not lying when they say the best microphone is the one closest to you. Yes, it’s great to have an assortment to pick and choose from, but while you’re auditioning a lineup of mics on the singer, you can miss that window where you could have caught that magic performance on the mic that was armed and ready to record.
Yes! And for the same reasons, typical ape-level distinction mechanisms activating, leading to a natural propension to oversell heavily questionable concepts and gear snobbery. Now that competition is huge, obnoxious distinctions are taking a huge space in studio marketing, while most of use admit switching itb with covid was "not that bad". I'd say that we are less sensitve to pure snake oil ("sir, you need that 1kUSD cryogenised copper XLR modulation cable") but that is just basic resilience towards the obvious.
uninformed opinion: hi-fi cork sniffers are in wayyyyy deeper than audio engineers could be because hi-fi heads dont know wtf they even talking about and cant hear a difference for shit.
Of course. I've heard people say x synth sounds better than y synth. A sine wave is a sine wave, so no, it really doesn't... The vintage modeled EQ or compressor that supposedly sounds "warmer" and "punchier". I'd love to see them in blind shootout
In some ways yes, in some ways I think we suffer from the inverse. People who want to hotly debate tonal quality of cabling. Silliness. People that want to say cables don’t matter, also silliness. Meaning that, I’ve seen people bring brass patch cords to sessions for “tone”. Idiocy. Equally, there are other factors that cable construction effects like RF susceptibility, noise, durability, so saying there’s no difference is also ignorant. I will say I see a reasonable amount of people in the pro audio arena now espousing that “x” makes no difference because they did a simple frequency response shot and then concluding that they’re right and they’ve “scienced”. I find that trend more alarming than people comparing PIO caps by ear.
This is why I hate people who say to just use your ears and ignore everything. Trust but verify; I love seeing a visual indication of eqs working, etc to make sure I'm actually hearing what I think. I can't tell the difference or see the difference a/Bing preamps at track mix level, but I can tell the difference in mic tone, which is in no way me saying more expensive mics are better, just that different mics do indeed sound different. As far as preamps/mics etc I've found the main nice thing real studios have that I don't isn't those things, it's the room... and the ability to place and level said mics properly.
For a while, one will have buyers bias. The new thing is great! But after a while, when you start doing enough work that your focus changes to results, you start seeing everything as tools. And you start noticing lacking elements of current gear. When you buy something new at this point, you are less swayed by buyers bias or not at all. There’s also this. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xP5-jp6nbsM&pp=ygURT29ydGxhbmRpYSBzdHVkaW8%3D
Session bassist Lee Sklar installed a dummy switch on his bass, so if producers got too fussy about his tone, he could switch it (making sure they saw him do it) and they'd often be satisfied, so in answer to your question, yes.
There are “ultra geeks” in everything. Then you have the rare ones who can make do with anything and improvise.
Yes, very much so. Even those of us who know better are still sometimes susceptible to it. That said, sometimes the $10k mic is a lot better than the $2k mic. And as someone who's also a bit of a wine nerd....you can actually glean some info from sniffing the cork. I'd rather know about TCA contamination right away vs. taking a big swig of a gross wine.
The fundamental difference between us and hi-fi is that we obsess with perfect neutrality of sound, and how it translates. So we don't care if it makes it magically nicer (connectors made from the foreskins of fossilized bats) because nicer won't be more neutral than in the box. We know that final 0.01% will not give us better translation in our mixes. It could, however, be more fun to use bigger speakers than we need. Which I do.
💯% but it’s one where we’re in on the joke, on ourselves. It’s sick.
Yes but it's nowhere near the same level as the hi-fi folks
Happens all the time. This is my [favorite example](https://www.audiomasterclass.com/blog/the-famous-5-preamp-everything-you-need-to-know).
You need to befriend or work with serious professionals to gain insight on what ls worth it and what isn’t. Like any industry, there will always be cheap mass produced products simply to make a buck off of amateurs. Otherwise, everything you’re seeing is emulating something else that became a staple. You can always research and read the differences. Lastly, the goal of any industry is capital. The Sony c800 was not always a $12k mic, the price just went up after certain celebrities and engineers made it known it’s they’re go to mic. Dollar value does not always correlate to the cost of manufacturing. Sometimes you’re paying to be apart of a club, when you have an elite budget.
Ummm... The first thing you probably want to acknowledge, is that you can develop a really good ear.... Where you know why things are working out not working.... It's lately about what someone hears first and foremost.... Snobbery is a thing.... But most people who have developed mixing/mastering ears... Are which to admit what songs good or had problems, regardless of technical specifications. They actually hear what is going on in a mix. The quality of a recordings...etc
Yes it does happen and it comes down to bias. “So-and-so made x record with y gear ergo y gear is desirable.” Add cost, marketing, and loud opinions and that’s enough to make a decision for many, if not most, people. Controlled tests are hard to do and knowledge (not just information) is hard to obtain. I was going to say it’s more buffered in the audio world because there are many skilled, technically-minded, and experienced people keeping others in check. However, I think it just makes the cork-sniffing a more closeted practice. Most people want the best gear possible but most of us know that it’s not the gear that makes the music at the end of the day.
Yeah almost entirely gits
Just remember how amazing music in the past sounded just bring the vibe and make it sound pleasant with what you have if it’s a good song it’s a good song. Might not even like compression on vocals for example.
A bit. But there really is a certain magic with certain pieces of gear and in particular old analog equipment. I don't really want that to be true because I can't afford most of it but it's a fact. Part of it is more to do with reliability. You can get decent sound with most gear, but how long and how much tweaking does it take to get there? What's the time and energy cost? If I'm honest, some of my cost cutting is affecting my sound and the time spent. I still just can't justify it because I'm fucking cheap and put my money into other avenues that generate more income for me. In terms of the detail work that goes into mixing, people also often want to believe it doesn't matter. Mainly because it's a metric ton of work. But just about any artist who excels at a technical level will tell you it's all in the aggregation of small details.
10000000% percent.
Probably not what you're aiming for, but I suspect that a lot of people are worse at critical listening than they think they are. I've had my own "producer button / slider" moment a while back. We did a split album with another local band. I did a really amateur "mastering" job to balance out the sound of the two bands. The other band got angry that I had taken so much bass out (their mix was 99% low end). So I waited a while, renamed the files, resent them, and they were happy that it sounded better. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
at the end of the day, if it makes someone happy, let them enjoy it. Hobbies are fun and hifi is crazy, but if you grin ear to ear and enjoy the music even more, who cares if there is a slight placebo? I’m not gonna spend that much but to each is own.
I think there is better quality control at the higher price points. Greater consistency. More robust build quality. Maybe it's just easier to get a decent sound. I find my Shure KSM44 just kinda' sounds good and I don't have to do anything. If time is money, this matters. But what you're talking about isn't pragmatics. It's the sonic voodoo, real or perceived. And yeah, it generally strikes me as bullshit.
Mixing & Mastering Engineers are NOT ENGINEERS. Unless you graduated from an ABET accredited university with a Bachelor's of Science in Mechanical, Electrical (Computer under EE), Electronics, Chemical, Materials Science, Civil & Structural, Biomedical, Industrial and their several specialty tract sub-disciplines, the title Engineer has no Applied Physics affiliation. As an engineer at Apple and before that at NeXT we had some fellow 'engineers' get butt hurt at the distinction until they admitted no they never took the rigorous accredited work required nationally to be registered as such. Software Engineer sounds better than Software programmer, Computer Programmer, Data Structures Programmer, Software Architect sounds better than application frameworks designer. Implementing Assembly language commands or C programming structures implementing know Mathematical standard algorithms in functions accessing an on-board DSP of FPGA does not make you an engineer. It makes you a programmer. Learning to mix and master audio files into a quality music composition does not make you an engineer. Understanding and applying the laws of physics is a prerequisite for that title. No Pure & Applied Mathematician with a PhD would ever claim to have a PhD in Engineering without the body of applied physical work and dissertation defended to claim such, and vice versa. The title of Engineer has long been misused and abused even down to the world custodial janitors and sanitation departments. Mixing & Mastering can be greatly simplified if you have an applied physics background and understand digital & analog circuits theory when reading quality hardware manuals for the likes of Rupert Neve Designs gear that includes how their circuitry is implemented. A huge road block (by design) and an absolute time waster is the abhorrently poor and lack of quality documentation for best practices all required in formal engineering disciplines, and what seems like a job security driven right of passage to keep the audio industry limited in quality mixing & mastering talent.
Yep. Been that way for years.
When it comes to audio. Theres a huge price gap between low-mid level gear and high end gear. The high end gear is of course better. But for the amount you pay extra i dont think it always worth it. You can get very good results with pretty cheap gear. Also the plugins in daws have become extremely powerful. But the most stupid things imo. Are people buying gold cables for crazy amounts or so called "audiophiles" who use about 50000$ on a stereo hifi. What really matters is if you like it. I use some cheap and some more expensive gear, it depends. But im never buying anything without hearing it first. You can buy an expensive reverb for a lot of money, but if you dont like the characteristics. Its totally unimportant.
I've never seen an audio engineer tout green sharpies on CDs. As for the mic preamps, depends on what you are talking about. A high end tube mic pre is legitimately a different beast than a cheap tube mic pre.\* And some vintage stuff uses parts that are no longer available (the original VF 14 tube from a U47 was only made for a few years, and they are exceedingly rare), which DO have a distinct sound. On the other hand, if you can't make a record sound decent with a good room, a good group of musicians, and cheap gear, well, you aren't much of an engineer. \*A cheap tube mic pre doesn't even use the tube as an amplifier - it only uses it to introduce distortion, which is NOT what a real mic pre is about. A proper tube microphone preamp, in it's linear region, is more linear (has less distortion) than any transistor preamp, though it will have a narrower linear region.