[LAU] New music, made with Ardour 3

Leigh Dyer lsd at wootangent.net
Mon Oct 24 01:39:00 UTC 2011


On 23/10/11 04:21, S. Massy wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 07:48:04PM +1100, Leigh Dyer wrote:
>> On 21/10/11 10:29 AM, S. Massy wrote:
>>> I very much like the mood of this piece, and, as someone else said, it
>>> could be longer... Unfortunately, there are a lot of issues with high
>>> frequencies to my ears caused by all the sweeping filters and the drum
>>> processing which makes it grating and spoils the mood. :( Hopefully,
>>> it's just some idiosyncrasy of my hardware or wetware (ears) and others
>>> will not be affected, because this piece is otherwise very good.
>>>
>>
>> Thanks for the feedback -- the glitchyness of the drums is
>> deliberate, of course, but I wonder if there's a way to smooth out
>> the higher frequencies a bit. I've heard people say that bouncing to
>> some good quality tape has various magical qualities, including
>> smoothing out high frequency transients in general, but I tend to be
>> suspicious of such claims :)
> I've heard similar claims, among others, that bouncing to a high quality
> VHS tape (using a quality VCR, obviously) can do wonders. My guess is it
> has something to do with gentle, non-linear, natural compression
> occuring at that stage, but other, more knowledgeable people probably
> could elucidate this better than I could.
>
I had actually been thinking about trying exactly that -- I do have a 
good quality hi-fi VCR here still, despite the fact that I haven't used 
it in years -- so I set it up yesterday and gave it a go. I hooked my 
laptop up to the VCR, played the track while recording, then swapped the 
connectors around, rewound the tape, and recorded the audio from the VCR 
back in to the laptop.

It's amazing just how clean the signal from the VCR is. In fact, it's so 
clean that it sounds identical to the original audio to me. Comparing 
the signals in Japa, I can see a sub-50Hz hump in the VCR's audio, and a 
slight roll off above about 10KHz. There's clearly some stuff going on 
in the time domain, too, but it's very subtle, and I definitely can't 
hear it myself.

So, an interesting exercise, but perhaps a pointless one :) I can upload 
the audio if anyone's curious and wants to do their own comparisons, though.

Thanks
Leigh


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