[LAU] New music, made with Ardour 3

[S. Massy]

On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 12:39:00PM +1100, Leigh Dyer wrote:
> 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.
If you can spare the time and provide a link to both the original and
bounced version, I'd be very interested to listen and see if I can hear
any difference. Al Thompson mentioned levels being important: How hot
did you bounce it?

very interesting exercise.

Cheers,
S.M.