How much "air" is too much?

diggy_dude

diggy_dude

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I'm listening to some Earth Wind & Fire songs that George Massenburg mixed around the mid-1980s. Like many CDs from that era, the high frequency energy seems excessive and unpleasant to me. Is there such a thing as the frequency response being "too good"?
 
I find the same thing from movies around the same era diggy!

Was that the time when a new trend was happening in audio? Like extended bass (especially in the theaters with movies like Earth Quake etc.) and they were trying to compensate.
 
moresound said:
Was that the time when a new trend was happening in audio?
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Well, all-digital (DDD) CDs were starting to hit the market, and I think there was a general desire among record companies to show off the extended frequency response of consumer digital audio vs. vinyl and cassette.

Ghetto blasters were popular too. I don't know if the ongoing adolescent fad of loading a car with 15" subwoofers had taken off yet.
 
I just checked out a few different tunes. While I can see what you mean, I think its nothing compared to the overwhelming shrill brightness of mainstream pop mixes you hear today.
Sometimes I question whether the whole "adding air" thing is ever a good idea. It seems to be a pretty popular catch phrase, and way to sell expensive EQs.
 
Absolutepower said:
I think its nothing compared to the overwhelming shrill brightness of mainstream pop mixes you hear today.
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I think a lot of the shrillness in today's music is caused by hypercompression over-emphasizing the upper harmonics. I agree the ringing is even more obnoxious than simply adding too much eq.

Absolutepower said:
Sometimes I question whether the whole "adding air" thing is ever a good idea. It seems to be a pretty popular catch phrase, and way to sell expensive EQs.
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Yes, it seems to be related to producers wanting to tout the benefits of digital on those older albums. It's about like the IT industry, where advances in software drive advances in hardware, and vice versa.
 
Aural Enhancers. Everybody had to have one. Aphex and BBE. The 'enhanced' high-end was due to the phase shifts being all outta whack when the analog mixes were first being transferred to CD.
 
cavedog101 said:
Aural Enhancers. Everybody had to have one. Aphex and BBE. The 'enhanced' high-end was due to the phase shifts being all outta whack when the analog mixes were first being transferred to CD.
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That's interesting. I read somewhere back in the 80s that all the old analog masters had RIAA equalization for vinyl and they forgot to reverse it when they transferred it to CD. But that doesn't make any sense when you think about it. No competent mastering engineer would overlook something like that.
 
I have one EQ box (Nightpro EQ3D) that has an Air band, with boost only. It has a few selectable HFs, with the top most being 40kHz. It's not plagued with phase shift issues. Actually, the whole EQ is decent, but the Air band gets the most attention by anyone that's used it. It's not what I would call a precision EQ as all of the bands overlap quite a lot, but it's the kind of EQ that you really just dial in by ear, rather than by the markings on the faceplate.

A judicious amount of "air" can open up the imaging.
 
I happened to be around back then... and heard what you guys are hearing not. It ain't "air" - its an upper-midrange forwardness that sounds harder than a coffin nail... and it was caused by the "bleeding edge digital technology" of the day. While I consider George a dear friend [and we've talked about this on more than a few occasions] the fact of the matter is that digital technology of the time had a whole lot of flaws.

The initial digital decks were 16 bit affairs so you had to make sure you got as close to 0dbfs as possible... which often pushed the limits of the analog equipment with which it was coupled [as analog 0VU usually equaled about -18dbfs... meaning you were pushing the analog gear near the limits of its headroom capability]. Additionally - the aliasing filters in those machines were rife with phase shift that was indeed highly palpable through the audible frequency spectrum. This phase shift slowed down the low end of the audio, and the high end of the audio causing the upper mid-range [mainly in the 2-5kHz region] to come from the speakers first... causing much of the "hardness" you hear in recordings of the time.

Another phenomenon that exacerbated the situation was that engineers of the time had assembled tool sets that were based on dealing with the anomalies of analog recording. Analog tape will lose high frequency content when its stored... and it will also lose high frequency content when you pass the tape over the heads repeatedly [like for overdubs]. There were companies at the time [like Stephen Paul Audio] who were modifying microphones to have things like 1.5 micron [and eventually .9 micron] diaphragms [most mics, like your stock Neumanns, AKGs, etc.] had 9 micron diaphragms in their capsule assemblies - these lighter material units provided a clearer, more omnipotent high frequency content that was desirable for analog recording [when you added a bit of EQ to compensate for the high end loss found in tape you had less to add... which brought up less tape noise / hiss].

Add things like these bright microphones to the inherent phase shift in the [digital] tape machines and I think you can see [hear?] where this is going. There is one other factor to add into the equation... and I don't know where George himself was in this mess [we've never talked about it]... but there was more than a little bit of cocaine flying around recording studios back then. You had young guys with great big piles of showbiz cash - unlimited studio time - rolling 15 hours a day for weeks on end... AND - at the time, it was common knowledge that cocaine wasn't addictive [the jones wasn't like heroin... therefor it wasn't addictive...] so yeah, there was more than a little bit of cocaine flying about.

One of the side effects of that drug [besides the ability to become much cash poorer in a hurry] is that it affects human hearing... as in you lose a whole bunch of high end in what you [as the engineer] are hearing... and compensate for that loss. Again, not the end of the world in analog recording because the tape was going to eat some of your treble anyway... but in the already hard sounding world of early digital recording... with tools that gave extended high frequency response... a nightmare!!

Any horseshit you read about not working with RIAA curves [etc.] is just that -- bullshit. Aural enhancers where more the rage in the late 70's early 80's than they were later on in life... and were certainly unnecessary once you weren't fighting with the high end loss attributable to analog tape... and while we're here... the Nightpro 3DEQ - with "air band" didn't come out until the early 90's... it lasted about 2-3 years and went the way of the doe-doe into obscurity. The 3DEQ had like 5 bands at set frequencies... but the bandwidth on those frequencies was like 4-5 octaves wide making much of what it could do pretty irrelevant with the exception of the "air band" which was centered around like 10 or 12kHz [I forget which] and was also helpful when printing to tape to exacerbate the HF content so you eq'ed in less top when mixing [so as not to bring up any more tape noise / hiss than necessary.

I hope this helps clarify some things...

Peace
 
Thanks, Fletcher. That was indeed very informative. Now that I think about it, it's digital artifacts that I'm hearing and not excessive high frequency eq. It's particularly noticeable on snare attacks. Songs on Electric Universe, Now and Zen, and Brothers in Arms (the first DDD disc I bought back then) were plagued with it, although the latter wasn't as harsh as the other two.
 
Right...the Nightpro is "loose" with it's wide, overlapping bands for any surgical purpose...but with more subtle boost/cut use, it's also less damaging than a tightly-focused surgical equalizer.
It's major flaw IMO is the lack of stereo coupling and stepped pots, which makes stereo matching a lot of work, so using it on a 2-bus is not very easy, but workable with some tones for level matching each band.
The Air Band (2.5, 5, 10, 20 & 40 kHz) and the Sub band are the most usable for 2-bus purposes.

It's certainly not a mastering grade equalizer, but like any decent EQ, it has it's uses, and most agree that it's "musical" (an overused term), which I guess means it's not nasty or rude sounding in any of its settings and when used for gentle tone shaping.

AFA the shorter lifespan of NTI (and you may have the better info on this, Fletcher), I think it was more due to a lack of serious marketing and them being a small company. So because of that shorter lifespan, there were not thousands of units making it out into the hands of users, though there are some that still use them and really love them (I believe Dave Reitzas is one engineer who uses his Nightpro EQ quite a bit), and people mostly praise the quality and the "easy/gentle" way it treats the music, and the overall opinion is that it has a quality build.

There was a nice writeup in Sound on Sound back in 1997: NTI Nightpro EQ3D

I got mine around 2001, and I noticed a slight difference in output between the two channels. They told me to send it back and agreed there was a 1/2 dB difference, so they sent me a new unit with perfect matching channels.
I think that they were closed down soon after that.....BUT.....
...they are back now as Maag Audio. The sons of Cliff Maag (founder of NTI/Nightpro) have come together to bring back a quality EQ and preamp under a new company! :cool:

Maag Audio | AIR BAND™ Mic Preamps and EQs | PREQ4 EQ4 (500 Series)
 
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