Sundown

Quite funny … 😀 One of my favorite songs is “Scarborough Fair” (Simon & Garfunkel), but the harpsichord part is terrible … It nearly ruins the track. It’s as it John Meszar got his moment and decided to go all-out. Todd

Boy, I can’t emphasize how much fun and enjoyment I’m having with TIDAL. It’s probably the best $25/month I’ve ever spent. And the difference becomes more apparent over time, almost as if my ears are getting “stronger” or more sensitive. I’m hearing details that I’ve never heard before and the warmth and reverb tails are to die for. Only a couple of songs have been “ruined” with high-res/MQA. The ambience might change when you hear it accurately, or you hear an annoying glitch that wasn’t noticeable before. In the latter case, I’m thinking of a specific pop song with a loop that has a nasty, repetitive pop/click that wasn’t apparent before. But most tracks come to life in a way that’s stunning. I’ve been rediscovering my music catalog (and new music) almost every day, and it’s just amazing to hear it with such depth. There is one disappointment in the catalog, and that’s Madonna’s “Lucky Star”. That’s my “wake-up-my-ears track”, because it has so much stereo activity and separation. It sensitizes my ears for a mix session, almost like calisthenics for the body. Luckily I have the CD version as clearly something went south with the MQA mix. The wonderful, auto-panned opening synth is reduced to a mono signal in the left channel (versus swirling around), and other elements of the mix sound mono as well. It’s nothing like the CD version which is just wonderfully deep and bouncing all over the place. But in all, I highly recommend TIDAL and MQA if you haven’t tried it. P.S. I have no financial connection to them, I’m just a happy customer with a recommendation. Todd

Yep - I’m going to have a lot of windows open. Todd

Thanks for all the input guys. I think I’m going to start with a lower temperature, despite Cardas’s recommendation. Steel melts at ~1,400F and nickel melts at 2,600F, but the eutectic solder is only 365F. 800F seems really high, but my iron can do it if need be. I’m aiming for a three-second joint. I’m not going to do a solder pot … For such small leads it doesn’t make sense and you really need a fume management solution if you’re going to keep a molten pot going. The TRS cables should be pretty easy. I’m looking less forward to the MIDI cables. Todd

Hey all, With my new home studio setup I need to shorten many existing cables and create some new patch cables. I have a lot of excess high-quality wire, so instead of buying yet more cables, I’ve decided to solder them myself. This will be a learning journey as I’ve never soldered before. I’ve got the right tools … I picked up a Weller WE 1010 station, a Milwaukee variable heat gun (for shrink tubing), a Mackie MTEST-1 cable tester, a lighted magnifying glass, and a set of helping hands. I also picked up various wire cutters and strippers. Most of the wire is Gepco 5522m which I think it discontinued, but I was able to screenshot the specs below. It’s a 22-gauge wire with two conductors, a copper braid shield, and a dedicated drain wire. Almost all of the connectors will be TRS so I chose Neutrik NP3X connectors. I do have some quad-star mic cable and I need to make a few new MIDI cables (with the Switchcraft 90-degree “clock” plug), but most of the work is TRS to TRS. The wire for the MIDI cables will be Mogami W2948 or in some cases quad-mic cable (Gepco MP1201 if I recall). I’ll be using Cardas Audio Quad Eutectic solder. The melting point is low (about 365F) but the recommended heat from Cardas is quite high (800F). Given the narrow gauge of wire I’ll be using a small tip on the soldering iron. Some of the demonstration videos for Cardas show a soldering pot (for tinning), but for such small tips I don’t think that’s needed. Admittedly some of the cables in the Cardas videos are thick, twisted speaker wire and not thin-gauge audio cables. I’ve watched a lot of videos and demonstrations and I don’t think there is anything else I can do other than get started and accept that I’ll make some mistakes. The high heat recommendation from Cardas is a bit puzzling, but I’m open to any suggestions or critique from the forum. I’ll be soldering as many as 30 connectors, so I’ll have quite a bit of practice when this is done. Thanks in advance. Todd

Hey all, Very clearly the plugin and software industries are moving toward subscription. The recent turnabout with Waves was interesting (they instituted it and then quickly pivoted to a dual path of perpetual and subscription licenses). But clearly they viewed subscription as a favorable business model. There are definitely things I like about the subscription model. If you really dig a companies products you can get *a lot* of content for $20-25/month. If (for example) Universal Audio moves their full catalog to the native platform (and holds pricing fairly), that would be far less than I spend annually on a couple of new perpetual licenses. Given how much I use their products, that would be a win for me. The problem comes when I only like some of a company’s products, or only need some of a company’s products. Steven Slate has a wide variety of plugins and some of them are very appealing to me. But I don’t really need another 1176 emulation. I don’t even want the distraction. So I thought of an interesting compromise: Instead of offering the full catalog or a two-step plan, why not offering a “Grab any Five” plan? Then you could pick the plugins you really want/need for a lower price. You could also offer an incremental cost for each additional plugin, up to the point that buying the full catalog makes more sense. I don’t know in practice if it would work on the business side. If (for example) a Waves customer picks five high-end reverb plugins, those plugins probably required a lot more R&D and work than a compressor plugin that was made a long time ago for less man hours. For the customer, it’s a better trade-off than the two or three-tier strategy that many companies offer, where invariably the plugins you really want are only in the highest priced bundle. Thoughts? Todd

Great feedback guys … I appreciate it. Craig - Interesting insight about durability … It makes sense. Some of the higher-end headphones might not take a beating, and a professional studio is going to have plenty of opportunities for damage. I’ve never been to a real mastering studio, but I would think an apprentice first listens to the material over headphones for basic flaws (pops, clicks, etc). Then the sonic adjustments (EQ, compression, limiting, etc.) would be done by the top dog engineer on high-end speakers. But my impression/opinion is that headphones are a better tool for identifying clicks, pops, artifacts, etc. My home studio is really quiet and really treated, but I don’t think I would pick up those minute details on monitors. I’m really on a hi-fi journey right now with my subscription to TIDAL, and I’m enjoying music I’ve known for a long time in totally new ways. MQA is giving me access to details and depth that I’ve missed for a long time, and I’ve been kicking around the idea of getting a top-flight set of cans. Todd

Hey all, I primarily record with headphones (I’m a keyboard player), and I mix on near fields in a fairly large treated room. Speakers give me the best stereo image, the best bottom end, and they are perhaps the harshest critic of music. If it doesn’t sound good on my monitors, it isn’t going to sound good elsewhere. Headphones are great for hearing small details and imperfections that would be difficult to catch on speakers. They’re also good for a secondary reference. The headphones I have are decent for the sub $200 category (KRK KNS 8400’s). They’re better than the Audio Tecnnicas I replaced. But you can spend a small fortune on headphones … A pair of high-end Grados or Sennheisers can set you back a grand or two. Sony has some high-end offerings as well. So if you walked into a high-end Mastering studio (or a high-end recording studio), what are you likely to find? What do the most discerning engineers use when listening to headphones? Thanks in advance. Todd

Great article, Craig … I was very surprised by the CD sales fact/trend. I shared it to some of my non-musician friends. Todd

Hey all, I recently decided to try a high-resolution streaming service and I chose TIDAL. I went with their premium package which supports MQAs. I’m using it on my studio PC (with an RME Multiface II DAC) and also on my iPhone. I don’t have a USB DAC for my phone so the most it can muster is 24 bit/48 KHz. But I’ll say that the bit depth alone makes a big difference (more so than sample rate). On my studio PC it’s up to 96 KHz / 24-bit. You can download albums and songs for playback anywhere, but it’s times like these that I wish I opted for a larger phone memory. The selection on TIDAL is quite good, depending on your tastes of course. There is little that I’ve searched for that I haven’t found, though not all of those selections are MQA (many are “HiFi” which I believe is equivalent to the CD standard of 44.1KHz/16-bit). And what you hear with MQA is certainly going to vary, depending on the material. But Boy, when you hit certain tracks, it’s hard to underscore how great it sounds with a good DAC, decent speakers, and a well-treated room. Anything with really intimate acoustic guitars, pianos, or even big orchestras, just sounds phenomenal. It’s worth it for me just for the enjoyment factor but I think it will improve my engineering chops as well, by giving me a clearer view of what left the studio for the professionals. Benchmarking yourself against a compromise or compressed format can only yield a compromise. I’ll keep the board posted as my journey continues, but right now I’m really enjoying it. Todd

I’ve been using Bing now for four days, and I like it. Maybe because it’s simply different. I’m finding links and information that I wasn’t getting with Google. I’m still using Chrome as my browser, but I changed the default search engine to Bing. I recommend giving it a try, certainly if you spend a lot of time on the internet. Todd

Hey all, I’m a technical guy, but I’m not a coder. My coding chops are limited to VBA, but I generally understand how coding and object-oriented languages work. I can typically understand what’s possible with software and what isn’t. I was on UA’s page the other day listening to some of the amp sims, and it just makes my head explode … The idea that you can plug a clean guitar signal into an interface and get an ultra-low latency sound that resembles not just a guitar amp, but a specific guitar amp, blows my mind. I can’t fathom what kind of programming it takes to mimic and model the quirks and characteristics of such a complicated sound, and one that interacts with your playing in real-time. And no less amazing, amp sims can be free to as little as a few hundred dollars. If you showed one of these to someone forty years ago they would think you invented time travel or perpetual motion. All plug-ins and digital algorithms are quite amazing, but a guitar amp sim is the one that knocks me backward the most. I know there are SDK’s for the various audio protocols, but I’m curious how a company even approaches a project like this. Do they build general code modules that can be strung together and modified to achieve a certain outcome (e.g. a gain module, an EQ band, etc.)? Do they use specialized software to analyze sound to help them capture and model the behavior of the target instrument? I have to believe they don’t start from scratch with a blank screen, but maybe I’m wrong. Thanks in advance for insight. Todd

I’m still using Chrome as a browser, but I just switched the search engine to Bing to give it a try. We’ll see how it goes. Todd

It will be interesting to see what AI does for sample playback. I don’t generally use keyboards to supplant actual instruments (absent drums which are impractical for me to record), but let’s face it, some of the libraries and articulations are getting to the point that a non-musician wouldn’t know the difference on record. Acoustic guitar libraries, acoustic or electric bass, string libraries, etc. are getting really convincing. Now you add AI into the mix and it starts reacting to your playing? Boy, that could really generate some interesting and realistic-sounding results. Todd

It would be interesting if Microsoft got some traction in the web world, where they have struggled so often to get a footing. Sure, Internet Explorer was used by many companies and people, but if it wasn't bundled with Windows, I don't think many would have chosen it. Todd

Hey all, I’ve been posting about DAW hardware and computers a lot lately, and I just wanted to provide an update on the minor improvements I’ve made to my elder statesman PCAL Rokbox (June 2012 build). My plan is still on track to get an all-new rackmounted PC in two years or less (also a Rokbox), but given what I just dropped on construction for my home studio, I have to wait a while. Nonetheless I was able to make some low-cost improvements to lower the noise that my existing unit makes so that it won’t get picked up by a condenser mic. I just wanted to share some of those improvements. I replaced my front and rear original Lian Li case fans with 120 mm BeQuiet units (Silent Wings 4). They are running in PWM mode and typically don’t turn more than 700-900 RPMs (the max for my units is 1,600 RPM). I replaced my original Coolermaster 650W NAXN power supply with a Corsair RM750x. It’s a semi-fanless unit meaning the fan only runs if the PSU is under heavy load. Last, I replaced my original Radeon HD7770 video card with a passively cooled ASUS GT730. The GT730 has four HDMI outs which is perfect for my three-monitor 1080p setup. CPU and case temps have been great, and the tower is overall much quieter. I can’t measure it because my SPL meter has a 30 dB floor. I have an mSATA drive that I’m going to add to the motherboard as the boot drive and I’m going to finally update my OS to Windows 10 and update all of my core DAW apps. I’m not looking forward to the transition time but I have much better notes now on licenses, etc. It should only take me a few weekends to get it done. The one improvement that I did toy with but ultimately abandoned was a PWM fan on the CPU cooler. I have an old Coolermaster setup with a pigtail on the fan that drops it down to 3 pins, which doesn’t support PWM. I thought a high-quality PWM fan would lower the overall RPMs and squeeze-out a few more decibels, but that didn’t happen (despite trying many different settings and curves for PWM). The PWM fan was much more active, spooling up over minor fluctuations in CPU temp, and I ultimately went back to my original voltage-based fan (which keeps my CPU between 70 and 85 degrees Celsius with pretty low RPMs). It’s been a fun little project and I appreciate the help along the way. Todd

Hey all, My wife and I watch an hour or two of TV in a given day and it's always streaming content (e.g. Netflix, Hulu, Apple TV, etc). We're both American by birth but we're drawn to British crime dramas, or crime dramas in general. The British shows tend to exhibit more authentic characters and character depth (in our opinion) and for whatever reason we magnetize to British content. But we watch our share of American and Scandinavian shows as well. If you set the above bias aside, it still seems like the dominant instrument for scores is the acoustic piano. Just a few notes or chords drenched in reverb will add depth and meaning to any show, and anecdotally it seems to be the instrument of choice. String sections are certainly second, but the reverberated piano seems to be the modern instrument of choice for scores. Do you find the same to be true in your viewing habits? Are scores biased toward piano? Or is this just anecdotal bias? Todd

Hi KP - Both books are great. I think Friedman does a great job of explaining the power of future computing without getting into a lot of technical minutiae. I believe it's Chapter 2 or 3. The entire premise of the book is the accelerating rate of change in the world. The "chessboard" metaphor is one that has been used before, and it's a great example of the power of compounding (and our inability to grasp the large numbers that result). Ariely's book is just fascinating about our natural biases and hang-ups ... We are not logical beings by any yardstick. Our brains are irrational, but certain trends and findings have emerged that make some of those tendencies predictable. Todd

We're entering an interesting time, that's for sure ... One of the most personally impactful non-fiction books I've read in the last few years was Thomas L. Friedman's Thank You For Being Late. When he talks about the chessboard and the second half of the chessboard (which is a metaphor for Moore's law), our feeble human brains really can't grasp what kind of power CPUs will have very soon. And that's just binary CPUs... That doesn't touch on quantum computing or some of the other emerging technologies. The interesting trend is that knowledge worker jobs are now at higher risk for automation than manual labor. A robot can be programmed to do very precise actions, but we're a far cry from a robot that can paint a house or solve a plumbing problem. Those trades are immune in the near-term to AI/robotics. My kids are very young and I don't know what kind of world they will see. My grandfather was born in 1901 and lived to 1986 and I often stand in awe of what he saw in his lifetime. I have a feeling my kids will see far more with the growing acceleration of change and technology. P.S. Another great book worth checking out is Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely. Our "logical" minds are anything but, and we suck at dealing with big numbers and probability (among many other things). Todd

Hi Gene, There is great insight/wisdom in your initial post, for this simple reason... Whenever I find myself jonesing for the latest analog re-issue or ROMpler superstation, I ask myself: "Is sound availability or sound quality really the thing holding me back from finishing projects?" The answer is always No. A new instrument might spark some creativity or new thoughts, but with the abundance of sounds at my disposal (from plugins alone), it's not the real obstacle. And no one (outside of perhaps someone on this discussion forum) is going to listen to one of my tracks and notice that my Oberheim sawtooth pad is a plugin and not a real OBXa. If I flip back to my start when I only had a Roland D-20, I explored the crap out of it. I didn't have anything else and while I'm not an expert at many things, I've pushed a Roland D-20 as hard as someone can. I know what that instrument can do. I don't have that same luxury of time (or constraint) today with the instruments at my disposal. One thing that I do when I get a new plugin is immediately rate the sounds. Most of them have a rating system and I mark the junk as one star and the good stuff as four or five stars. I would delete the garbage presets outright if I could (some are really bad or not to my liking), but that's not always possible with factory libraries. Even with 1,000 presets, I might only find 20-30 that are five stars and maybe another 20-30 that are four stars. And maybe there are another 20 to 40 that can be tweaked into something decent. The rest (in my experience) is garbage, or just not in line with my tastes. Todd

I have little doubt of that ... Artists who honed their skills playing live make better records. Period. Todd

Thanks for all the feedback guys. I’m a Windows user but it’s interesting to hear the Mac side as well. When it comes time to buy, I’ll do an assessment of what I have for compatibility. I would hate to buy new displays that aren’t 4K (though I’m not sure my little work laptop could power one of those huge 40” curved widescreens, and I use my studio as my home office as well). Maybe I would get a pair of 27” or a pair of 30” screens, instead of one curved display. The biggest risk I see right now is UAD, though I know they are working on it for PC. I’m quite sure they are going to port their full library over to their native subscription platform, and maybe then we will see HiDPI. There isn’t a track I write that doesn’t have at least 5 to 10 UAD plugins on it (usually an 1176 or two, a reverb or two, and almost always their SSL G-Bus compressor). I also use their Precision Mastering plugins, though I’m starting to use Newfangled Audio’s Elevate bundle. Waves has already updated for HiDPI and I believe Fabfilter has as well. Fabfilter is my favorite “new guy on the block” and I think their Pro Q3 is the EQ to beat for surgical work. I can convince myself to let go of NI FM8 and Pro53 (though I still like Pro53 better than any other Prophet emulation, despite it’s age). There are a lot of FM synths that have come out since FM8, and HALion 7 has a DX7/TX81Z import feature now. I have always liked the original release better anyhow (FM7). But there are still quite a few instruments and plugins that might not be there yet … I don’t know if Steven Slate’s stuff is updated and I don’t think Synthogy’s Ivory II is updated (and that’s my go-to piano). There are some great free plugins that I’m quite sure aren’t there yet. An example would be TAL-CHORUS-LX. You won’t find a better sounding Roland-like Chorus, and it’s free (though the controls are simple enough that I could still probably operate them at half size). We’ll see where the market goes in the next year or two, but it’s something I will be watching closely. Todd

I’m an automotive engineer and CAD designer (not a programmer), but the kids coming out of college seem to be drawn to Python, primarily because RPA bots and analytics are so popular. While VB/VBA is a run-time language (it’s not pre-compiled so it executes slowly), it’s still very powerful for cross-application stuff, particularly with Microsoft Office. Someone with deep VB/VBA chops and Excel and SharePoint can do some really impressive stuff for business. Add in Microsoft’s Power Automate and it really starts to get interesting. My assumption/belief is that most traditional applications (including our DAW software) is C++. Depending on what you want to do, that’s still a very capable widespread language. Todd

Hey all, I’ve been daydreaming and shopping for new DAW hardware. A PC Audio Labs Rokbox with a Core i9 13900K CPU and 128 GB of RAM would be my choice if purchased today. But I was looking at new displays, and it sure seems like legacy plugins are hosed when it comes to high resolutions (e.g. 4K, 8K, etc). To leverage all of these pixels it seems like you need to engage HiDPI, but if a plugin is old and doesn’t support it, it will be far too small. And among my plugin collection, I certainly use some elder statesmen. I love these curved displays, but if HiDPI is the enabler, it’s not going to work with my collection of software. My core platform (Cubase 12) can support HiDPI, but I have plenty of early 2000 plugins that I’m sure would be left behind (and I’m not ready to let go of them). Is my interpretation correct, or are there ways to leverage these behemoth displays with legacy software? Todd

Hi Craig. I’ve talked to them recently about a new system (and I did get some help from them on reassembling my case/tower), but I’m pretty far our of warranty. My PC is a relic compared to what they sell now, and I sort of went rogue with installing a new GPU. But it’s all good … I’m happy with where I’m at and when the time is right (1-2 years), I’m going to buy a top-flight rig from them again. Todd