| bobkatz wrote on Sat, 19 March 2005 09:53 |
Because I believe it is a hopeless case. You can't shine a turd. I'm also skeptical that any human being can MANUALLY "volume map" the short-term microdynamics back into something that was this smashed without using some kind of an expander tied to the movement of the material. But forget about it, there's no movement there to trigger an expander. As far as I'm concerned, it's a dead issue and the distortion can never be removed. This could very well be the case of Dave Collins' "is this really just different pumping".
I admire the masochism but I have to go with my gut feelings on this. If I see someone who listens to Chris's or Bills' or anyone's restoration and saying "Wow, this really sounds much better", I'll wake up and take a listen, but until then I don't have time to listen to a bunch of guys experiments on what I believe is truly a dead corpse.
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Aw, Bob, you're not even gonna LISTEN? At least listen to mine- I'm the guy who re-synched your Shuttle Launch files for you, remember? I did have a guy say 'wow this really sounds much better' though they meant 'better than the exaggerated version you had before'.
I don't think Bill is putting anything like microdynamics in- sounds like he's putting in large-scale macrodynamics of the sort I decided not to use. I have to take issue to one of your statements, though, as follows:
There is movement, loads of movement, and it tracks the dynamic shifts very accurately but it is not peak amplitude. It's average level that is shifting. If you don't believe that, you should be listening to my 'Exaggerated' example (an mp3) because it makes the point pretty obviously (even though it is too exaggerated to sound right). If other people's expanders aren't tracking that well, maybe they're not trying to track as much of an average, or they aren't adjusting the transfer function of the track like mine is.
To me the really interesting thing is the way in which use of tape saturation plugins, etc. produce a file where the dynamics are encapsulated in levels of distortion, which isn't typically a 'hard clip' distortion. You could put a really clean compressor on it instead, and my shenanigans would be rendered completely helpless (and it wouldn't sound anything like as 'smashed'). It is the distortion itself, the 'smash' that serves as something to track... all you have to do is track the average absolute value, and there it is...
Which gives rise to the question of whether you can address this as Bill did, by trying to unsmash the tone with EQ and then reassigning volume levels. I think to some extent this is in error, because smash (in the sense of overdrive/saturation) is not an EQ issue. It's a transfer function akin to Line 6 POD- and as such it is to some extent reversible.
If you have a guitar going through a tube amp its hottest peaks get squished. If you ignore issues like rectifier sag you've got a 'squish' that's not really compresson because there's no time base on it- it just reassigns the volume levels like assigning a transfer function on a sample by sample basis. No matter what frequency you put in, you get a similar 'saturation' out. By the same token, if you have the resolution you can put the saturation in, apply the exact opposite transform and get the 'source' out- or at least a lot closer to the source than you would get with EQ, because it isn't any particular frequency being applied and removed, it's relative to the shape of the amplitude space (cue DC, whistling the theme from Lost In Amplitude Space).
In effect, the expansion I was doing, since it also involves some of the straight transfer function remap stuff, is simultaneously trying to undistort the baritone surf guitar, the horns, the vocals, and everything else. I think it liked the stuff that was more saturated- stuff that seemed more L1, like the snare I kept trying to unbury, tended to confuse my routine and didn't respond as well. The stuff where dynamic punch extended into the bass worked very nicely because it tended to give a real clear signal to the expander, 'this is more dense, see?' and the expander would kick in rapidly to put dynamic kick behind the bass content.
C'mon, Bob, be a sport. We may be daft but we're trying such different things! And the recording is NOT junk. On the contrary, it's a very interesting experiment, kind of like pre-emphasis. Think of it as like being Dolby encoded- how do you decode?
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Topic: "Restoration" shootout: Livin La Vida Loca (Read 20681 times)