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Looper's Delight
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>>Uh... I find this a little hard to believe. How could it possibly know what the correct signal
should be like? I imagine that phase distortion can vary wildly from device to device and are very
complex. Sounds like pseudo science (see: Marketing) to me. What if you put it all through your
cables running in the wrong direction? What I imagine the BBE sonic maximizer is doing is adding
small amounts of eq boost to certain frequencies when they already exist at some defined level. Am I
wrong?<<
it has got a little bit of science inside it, and the results are convincing enough that many "top" studios swear by the things. I fixed one once, and there wasn't much inside it, but essentially what they do is the electrical equivalent of phase-aligning your tweeter and woofer, so that a transient sound, such as a single note or beat, has all it's vital components rendered simultaneously instead of as a vague mushy general pushing-of-air-in-the-direction-of-the-listener.
that's the theory.
in practice (and while I have the greatest of respect for barcus berry and his chaps), I'm fairly sure that all that goes on (useful though it is) is a general reversal of the group-delay introduced by reactive components (decoupling capacitors &c) elsewhere in the signal path. this group delay puts high and low frequency components of the same sound out of step with each other, so that the waveform of a complex signal would be visibly distorted....
a snare drum, for instance, has a low frequency thump and a burst of almost-white noise. if these don't emerge from a loudspeaker with the same timing relative to one another as they did in real life, you have that classic market-speak "loss of detail" or, in other words, your complex waveform has undergone a frequency-dependent phase shift sufficient to diminish it's impact. to some extent or other, the same effect is apparent on almost all musical waveforms. I'd exclude the flute and certain woodwinds..... :-)
the reversal is adjusted by the user (is there a fully automatic one? it would, as mark suggests, be in need of some intelligence....) until it sounds like fog clearing; I know, I've tried it and it does seem to work, but assumes an average group delay for the entire signal. or you buy lots of them, one for each channel of y'r multitrack.
there's usually some eq with the box too, but the effect is apparent with everything flat. I never put a 'scope on one though but. I'm just saying.....
duncan/r.m.i. (can you tell I'm working late?)
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