combi gear?

dobro

dobro

Well-known member
I've bought all my outboard gear separately, as different units, each for their own function - preamps, compressor, reverb - all separate. Yet you see a lot of gear that combines different functions into the same unit. For example, I was looking at the tc electronic gold channel yesterday - it's got mic preamps, D/A A/D converters, EQ, a compressor, and some kind of enhancer/distortion device for adding spice to the mix which I don't understand at all, never having used anything like this. My question isn't about this particular unit particularly, but what a load of functions in one unit!

My question is: what do you think of gear that combines various functions like this? -

a) good, because of minimal cabling, plus the company will come up with functions that work well together

b) possibly crappy, because the package might easily contain a good EQ unit, but a less than good compressor, and so on.

c) combination gear is like any other gear - some of it's great, some's good, some's okay, and some wastes your time and money - you get what you pay for
 
So far,it's been my experience that there's usually some type of tradeoff with combination or multifunction gear;if it's not some type of sonic tradeoff,then it's in the area of user friendliness.I've come to the conclusion that it's more a question of deciding how easily you can live with whatever the particular box doesn't do exactly like you wish it would vs.the things it DOES do that you find really cool.I have a Roland VS-880EX which I feel is a classic example of this but in my case the things it does well for me outweigh the "what were they thinking" category.One thing I will say for multifunction stuff is that it keeps your signal path shorter and sometimes that alone can be a great asset.Cheers!
 
In my experience: Multi functional gear usually means digital, which means staring at a small, dim LCD for hours. How many poorly identified pages are you willing to scroll through to tweak the setings to your approval?
multi funcunctional gear may pose less of a risk in the gain-staging department, but it seems like I find (unless it's very high end)that the quality of at least SOME of the components are sacrificed.
interesting discussion.
 
In consumer stereo equipment there is usually
a tradeoff and audiophiles usually have seperate amps, tuners, etc, each of high quality. I would think it is the same in the
signal processing industry? What I would like to know is how does the computer fx compare with outboard equipment. You have all this hardware dedicated to the processing of the signal in outboard equipment, how do they package that into a software package? In outboard equipment is
the analog audio signal processed by digital
components or converted to digital first then processed digitally, does the computer work this way, converting then processing, if so, how can a computer with very little hardware dedicated to signal processing give
the same quality sound as the outboard gear? This is something I have been wondering about but was afraid to ask.
 
Dragonworks you're off topic and what you're wondering about should have its own thread, but I'm really interested in this too, so let's mix it up!

I agonized for a while about whether to go the software or outboard gear route. The dilemma is this: when you buy an amp or a mic, you can go down to the shop, try out a few, compare, and make at least a slightly intelligent decision. With outboard gear vs software, that's impossible - there's no way you can A/B all the different reverb units and software reverbs at your budget level, for example. Maybe some engineers who work different studios have done this, but do you really think there are many engineers who have A/B'd *all* the reverb plugins and *all* the outboard reverbs? And that goes for compressors, EQ, enhancers, preamps - you name it.

When it comes to what outboard/software really sounds like, you're dependent on two things:

1 Your own ears, and like I said, who's in a position to actually compare all this stuff?

2 Other people's reports. This too is really dodgy, because people's tastes and standards vary (for example, I like my Rode NT-1, but Sonusman has reservations about that mic), and also some people don't know what they're talking about. :)

The conclusion? I keep reading interviews with pro engineers who keep saying something like 'the software's getting *very* close in quality to topline outboard gear these days. But of course, they're talking about topline software, aren't they? So in the end, I think that, by and large, you get what you pay for. Which means there isn't as much to worry about as you thought. :D
 
How does the software manipulate the singal when the software has no hardware except the
computer.Is the hardware in the computer dedicated to reverb etc built into the sound card. No it cant be, they cant have all those effects on the sound card so it must be
in the software. But how can sofware with no
hardware manipulate the signal as well as say
lexicon equipment that has all that elec circutry designed specifically for that purpose? Im sure sonusman will know the answer to this?
 
When you record to hard disk, (the card or the software, I'm not sure which) converts the analog signal to digital. At that point, software can do anything with the digital information - the important thing seems to be getting software and soundcards that can handle good bitdepth and sampling rate, because when the software starts processing digital data, higher bitdepth and sampling rate means less distortion. Different software companies use different algorithms (prefab formulas for processing/manipulating/altering the original data in a way that sounds like reverb) to achieve their results, which is how the outboard gear manufacturers do it as well, I think.

Okay, this has been the Rough Guide to digital processing, and others will supply finer tuning and corrections, but I think that's approximately it.
 
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