Making Records with Eric Valentine - What Can We Really Hear, When Comparing EQs PART 1?
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- Опубліковано 14 гру 2023
- In this episode, I invite you all to dive into the world of blind A/B listening and see what is perceivable when comparing EQs! I discuss a bit of the controversy surrounding blind listening, the factors that can influence perceptibility in this context, and techniques for hearing very minute differences in audio. You can download the files used in this test as a pro tools session or as raw audio files.
You can also find a link to the free blind AB plugin I use below.
Here is a link for the Pool Tools session
www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/fus0sh...
Here is a link to just the audio files
www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/gjj1ow...
Here is a link to the HOFA blind AB plugin
hofa-plugins.de/en/plugins/4u/
I love how you very happily kill the sacred cows. You're a dangerous man to the audio retail industry, and a valuable voice to artists and engineers in the field. Thank you!
Eric’s only attitude to sacred cows is to milk them till they’re dry and chafing.
Hey All!! thank you for all the thoughtful questions and comments. AND thank you for taking the time to try this test. I will respond to all the questions and comments in the part 2 episode. It can all be part of the continued discussion :)
One trick about HOFA BLIND AB is that you can switch between tracks pressing the numbers on the numpad. I find it faster and easier than having to do it with the mouse plus it helps to close my eyes when doing these kinds of tests
great software! i use their 4ULevelMeter for offline drag & drop LUFS metering
Holy shit! That's huge. I feel like looking at the buttons and revealing the answers tricks my brain when I randomize it again.
Yes, it is an inviting path to go down to consider what one cannot hear. Helps you train on what you should be able to hear insted of wasting time on what you'cant' hear.
EV, I wanted to thank you for your "deconstruction" videos!! I have learned more and more quickly from your tutorials than any other YT channel! Your mixes are fabulous, obviously, and I really wanted to be sure I wrote and let you know the positive impact your mixing teachings have had on my own songs and mixes!! Many, many thanks from south Louisiana, and keep on ROCKING, big guy!!!
I have never done this. Thank you for explaining it very thoroughly.
wow! i'm only 12 minutes in and loving the realness and just plain common sense logic of how you do the blind testing...YES!!! just two sources...jeepers that makes such amazing sense to me now that you explain it, and the 5 times in a row thingy...absolutely! I've always wondered at the "most of the time" crowd...especially as I get older and have trouble hearing higher frequencies....I don't want to be guessing....I want to just absolutely know it without a doubt!....anyway...awesome, and amazing as usual! Excited to hit play and continue watching!!!
Well, I just bought an MPDI4. Been wanting one for years and finally have done it... Im so excited. Im gonna be recording everything!! Thank you Eric!!!
Thank you for this video and hello from eastern Canada. I did a Mix With The Masters seminar w. Shawn Everett this September. His use of FabFilter's EQ match was incredibly creative and life changing. If/when you get into hosting production seminars, he would be a great addition.
Can you describe some of it? I remember seeing a video of him mentioning that
You are the man! Agree with this 100% Love this nerdy content
I used to worry about plugins or hardware replicating "classic" gear. I don't really worry about it anymore. If it sounds good, hurray! I don't care how close it is to my first neve console. I just use stuff that works and sounds good. Looking forward to using your new eq.
What you don't measure, you don't understand.
If you cannot tell something apart from other thing by listening, then you are deluding yourself.
Thanks for opening this debate, it has surely been on my mind lately.
Eric you are the greatest producer ever. Your production stands out even from other professionals ! Whenever your songs come on the radio and i hear that kick drum or snare, i know thats you. Some mixes have great separation but your mixes sound like there is a huge space between instruments compared to them and even they sound fenomenal altogether at the same time which is kinda impossible... You could easily fit in 10000 instruments into a song. Mindblowing.
After listening to the downloaded files.... I can hear differences in all instances but I would not hesitate to use UTA eq. Impressive how well each compares.
WOW opening the session and hearing it its crazy
YES!!! Remove the other forms of input/info (track names/plugin UI, etc.) and all the pre-conceived notions suddenly seem to evaporate!! 😂. It’s astonishing how many people draw a line in the sand so confidently and then won’t even put themselves in a situation to be proven wrong. 👍🏼 Eric for shining a light on this and suggesting people finally start calling bullshit on themselves.
I was surprised to hear the differences. My approach to this was by choosing the best take. And then I just looking for the things that I liked during first impression. But I was noticed, that "5 times in a row" scenario is difficult to achieve. Ears simply adapting to the sound. And in my case it was really fast. It is fact that the best decisions during mixing we have to do as
quickly as possible (during seconds) For me It was priceless opening)
As for EQ sound. I'm sure, differences will not be audible in a mix. Thanks for this test!
Thanks Eric!
It this era of looking at what you’re hearing on a screen, it’s so easy to fool yourself! Anybody who’s done eq moves with a plug-in in bypass knows it’s true.
lol yep! The 'Engine-EYES' instead of 'engine-EARS' issue!
I was even worse, the other day I accidentally put my DAW on mono without noticing, and then proceeded to make what I felt like were all kinds of subtle stereo changes. I knew it was a narrow sounding mix but I only realised everything was completely mono'd when I tried to do something drastic 😂
I got a job at a HiFi store at eighteen. I spent several long nights with all the speaker cables, line level cables and power cables. Swapping them out with a friend and blind testing them. Luckily I put a lot of myths behind me early on but the studio experience has shown me how vulnerable I am to placebo.
Amazing. Did the test with Logic's Match eq, and after some level matching (the match eq some how didn't level match), with AirPods pros it was impossible to hear differences
I’m averaging 50/50 across the board. I’d be curious to hear an all pro q3 vs all uta comparison.
Kudos to you for the professional rigour. Bringing rigour to this game is what has long been needed to get away from the bad rap of opinionated meatheads in black t-shirts who think they are always right.
What gets me abut the super hard core audiophiles is that they say all these things make a drastic difference (maybe to them they do), but they say they ultimately want to hear the music as the artists intended it to be heard.
Definitely a subtle difference in the low end
Hey Eric! One question: Do you have any recommendation for a log run of microphone cable? AES cable? any particular brand, model... ? I need to set up a temporary recording booth in another room which is far away from my control room where I have all my mic preamps, but I want to make sure that I'm not screwing up my signal. Thanks!!!
Hi Eric, what do you think of the Softube Tape plugin? I’d be curious to know if it achieves something close to what you get from the real deal.
Hey Eric, I’ve got a question maybe you can answer in a WTF episode. You’ve mentioned Hosa cables before, but I don’t remember you using Hosa in your barn building episodes. When do you use Hosa cables and what for? Are there times that you think high end cables are worth it?
Cheers,
Aidan
In the arc of your musical experiences have you ever transcribed music? Not just learn a part but meticulously write it down? I taught guitar for two decades and transcribing guitar and bass parts taught me to focus my hearing. Especially parsing out two parts panned to the same speaker. So many elements of timbre and saturation to try and distinguish. It's wild what the brain can do to slice up sounds.
Eric Valentine is the Alton Brown of the recording world
Thanks for doing this. I was able to discern the Neve vs UTA in blind test 100%. But the others, I could hear no difference. But here's something interesting: I found it hardest to discern the ProQ3 EQ Match curve from the Neve (once level matched). Could still pick it out pretty much every time, but definitely took some very careful listening.
What about neve vs pro q3?
@@kev1n28 Yes, I can hear the same difference Neve vs Q3 (Eric's curve).
CHRISTMAS MOON SOUNDS INCREDIBLE!!!!!!!!! Wtf- please god do a deconstruction- You and Grace HAVE to do an entire album that sounds like that- i feel like I finally got to hear a clean Phil Specter recording - the backing vocals are UNBELIEVABLE
Eric, I recall on your Keith Urban "Horses" breakdown you mention that the UTA console has this sort of density in the high frequencies. Im assuming this can be attributed to the way the UTA amp ciruit is saturating the high freqs way more than the lows? As I am diving into analog summing world, I notice my 1073 clones are distorting waaay more in the low end similar to what you demonstrated, whichI find not very useful as the kick/bass get all farty and lose their punch. Would be interesting to compare the UTA to API circuit as well.
Wow yea, I did some testing, I totally failed on the neve vs Pro-q eq test. Haha. During the blindtest i was so confident which sounded better in all the 5 rounds, but it end up being just a coinflip. XD
I'm very grateful to you, Eric, for sharing this! The one I can tell a difference for sure is Neve on drums and in a full mix. Other EQs are surprisingly very close in perception with UTEQ500.
Absolutely.
Which company and name of the eyeglasses? They’re so cool.
G-force Software did a really interesting thing some time ago when they released a software version of the Oberheim 8-voice synth. The introduction video was the original 8-voice synth in focus with someone playing the sounds we hear in the video, fiddling the knobs in realtime as we hear the sound evolve accordingly - first reaction being this thing sounds good! Only thing is it's not the hardware synth that's making the sound which the viewer understands not until the scene transforms showing the software version that actually makes the sound.
What this shows is something some people (many in the audiophile community) finds it hard to understand, which is the psychology behind how we colour the perception with preconception.
If the video started with showing the software synth we would probably think it's sounds very good. But not as good. By fooling the viewer thinking we watch the actual hardware we clear the preconception of software not sounding as good as the hardware.
This would be possible to do with all hardware e.g. a guitar amp vs it's amp simulator equivalent.
Hey Eric...what about using Q-clone???? I used it a few years back and it seemed to work surprisingly well for me...had to clone some rented ISA Eqs to finish a session in ah pinch($$$$) now I'm wondering if I was just psyched out...LMAO.
💕💕💕
Can someone tell me what to listen for at 44:50 for the audible difference? (Eric says there's definitely one at 45:38) If I close my eyes when he switches them, they sound the same to me. I'm genuinely curious!
Listen to the high end of the snare change. You can hear there is more top end in one of them and the tone changes.
@@oldman1944 I can't hear it :( Maybe my ears aren't good at deciphering these differences in snare sound? Can you tell on UA-cam or do you have to do this with the files?
@@aidanknight I'm just listening on UA-cam with a set of decent headphones. I have been mixing for many years though so I have plenty of hearing training which makes it much easier. Listen to the shhhh sound in the snare change between the two.
@@oldman1944 Also an engineer and my headphones aren't revealing anything. Maybe I've finally lost my hearing 😬
@@aidanknight It's subtle enough that it could be imagined. Wouldn't worry about it at all dude.
Tried to do the test exactly the way you suggested and to be honest I couldn't hear a difference.. The first 2 tries I got it right but then after that it began tricking me.
preliminary testing on the drums file, pro-q vs neve on shitty headphones, built-in macbook pro audio output jack: i can't get 5 in a row.
(i looped just the first bar and needed to add 3.0 dB to the pro-q file to match the LUFS.)
preliminary conclusion: i love my tape machines and my hardware compressors, but i will not be buying any hardware EQs.
thanks for doing this, eric!!!
Monster cables vs coat-hangers...
❤
🎉
Whats the other video to watch? That he keeps referencing?
😻
We should do another round of testing pushing a hotter level into the units and see if the tone does infact become more apparent. Wouldn’t it be nuts if that theory was also debunked?
This also why I stopped spending big money on Preamps. I did some AB testing on the same mic and source though pretty much every preamp in the room and the only ones that stood out were the weird modified Tube PA heads and other weird stuff like Shure M67, Otari Pre, ETC. Every "High End" Preamp I had (Sytek, Neve, API) were almost undiscernible from each other, and also they were almost completely teh same as some preamps from a cheap Allen Heath GL2200 live mixer I use as a PA mixer in the love room. The Allen Heath Preamps were actually a little less noisy than the Neve and API. You cant get quieter than the Sytek so it won there. Tonally they were identical unless I drove them into clip. Still, I found zero reason to spend $200-$500 + per channel on Preamps. It was eyeopening. Incontext to an entire mix its a waste of time to be picky about preamps.
Neve and API were "almost undiscernable from each other..."?
What were you listening through?
Adam A7x. They are totally different when overdriven, but i was testing in a way where I was trying to compare the preamps with as clean a signal as I could get and achieve the same output. Basically that is what they are designed to do and clipping the pre is actually abuse of what it was designed to do , regardless of how we like to hear them. until you are pushing preamps into saturation, the differences are minute and mostly inconsequential. These days im 100% in the box, so I can take any clean signal and apply any variety of saturation after the fact so obsessing over the choice of preamp going in is a waste of time and can be detrimental to the mix going forward is I don't like it later. Now I'd rather just spend that money on microphone flavors and go with any pre that is relatively clean and has a low noise floor. To each his own., but people have been sold a huge line of marketing BS on how much "better" or "warm" or whatever when it comes to mic pres. they are simple small amplifiers. nothing more. There is zero magic in a preamp. @@siriusfun
Yeah, even if there were differences between those amps, I'd still argue that they're MINUTE compared to something so simple as moving your head 1 inch to the left of your normal listening position. It's actually wild how overstated many of the 'differences' talked about in the audio industry are, never mind deciding what is a better or worse difference.
Eric, if you haven't yet, treat yourself to some Stager ribbons!
On the subject of DOES IT MATTER??? (overall and to the average listener).... I think one of the reasons we're hearing lower quality recordings (especially when it comes to the more nuanced and accumulative stuff: timbres with harmonic distortion especially) is because we've got so many more creators of average engineering/ears-talent, but with a comparatively higher level of writing & performing talent with access to recording gear; l they're making their own records - and they sound worse than they should; the songs are better than the recordings - in the old days, they'd be paired up with higher level engineers and mixers who would raise that side of their game, and we'd get a result that's firing on all cylinders... this new reality is just one of many reasons why we're hearing the overall quality of music go down at the upper levels .... and part of this is because the masses (middle of the bell curve folks) can't perceive those differences as well (or not at all), so it becomes acceptable. The old school label gate keepers (say pre 2010 ish) did serve a purpose of raising the overall game of artists by maximizing the talent level of all those involved when possible....
Not sure I've done a great job of expressing the idea above... but it's a very real thing I've noticed.
👍🏾👍🏾😂😂
Disagree that you have to be able to do it every time. For two BIG reasons:
1) Our perceptions DO shift depending on various factors (blood sugar, energy levels, variances in neurochemistry: mood/focus/stress) -- some days (or even hour to hour or minute to minute) I'm more sensitive to variances in pitch than others... some days my time is better than others (on drums for example). We're humans, we're not machines. Perception is fluid in ways that make this "every time" thing not a totally rock solid a way to judge differences in the realm of "subtle". The audio may not change... but we do.
2) (this one Eric mentioned) There really is an accumulative effect of many things in audio - things become more noticeable in larger layered quantities that isn't apparent in fewer layers - for example, it's more difficult to hear the difference between a Neve and an API mic pre on one source, and one track... but it's easier to notice if one or the other was used across every track in an entire production. Harmonic distortion is a BIG ONE for this accumulative thing... it can be subtle on each track, but if every track has a solid amount of barely noticeable harmonic distortion... it's more clearly noticeable once there are many tracks. It adds up.
Thoughts?
Adam
If it not noticeable 5 or 10 times in a row (weather if it's because of blood sugar or an accumulative effect), then maybe it's not that important. that's the whole point I think.
@@tigredejadeec my point was on the 100% thing... and on another level I'll describe more below (the gestalt)....
I think, missing one or two because of lack of focus or whatever doesn't negate the perception of differences... there are differences that you notice when you're passively listening that you don't when you're focusing intently. It's a little like peripheral vision... but with ears:)! I mostly agree with what Eric is saying here... it's mostly indisputable... But there are exceptions. Maybe the biggest one (I've realized as I'm writing this) is, I think there are differences you can feel (perceive emotionally as a gestalt of the Sonics) when you're not actively listening for specific differences in one register or another (highs, mids, lows, whatever)... this is a different kind of listening... more like a fan than an expert. More with the heart than the head, you might say. It's like when you notice something in a mix, when it's on in the background, as opposed to when you're "mixing!". This is just my opinion and experience... not really in opposition to what EV is saying, but a bit in parallel.
Tell me you have an audiophile listening setup without telling me you have an audiophile listening setup 😂 just kidding bro
@@DMKahnha! Truth is, I was born deaf... I listen with my taste buds.
I agree cumulative effect does make the differences more perceivable. In Erics A/B I downloaded the files and cant get 5 between the Neve and Pro q3 reliably (yet, im motivated to tho).
I think the humans not being perfect point isn't very relevant - if its not perceivable on a given normal day for atleast the average audio engineer- its almost 99% percent chance whatever difference there is in the files is inconsequential.
But cumulative effect is real and also the fact of driving the analog hardware harder to pronounce the harmonic distortion. We could just do a test of "hey lets run track A through a Neve 1073 at line level and see how many passes through the Neve are necessary to reliably hit 5 in a row guesses on an A/B against the digital non processed file." Would it be 1 pass or 3 passes? How many passes would be necessary to hear it if we drove the signal 4db harder into the neve? - Run the digital file through the converter as well to fully isolate the variable of the hardware. There would obviously be a difference as I've heard, I've bought analog just to run digital files through at line level. Harmonic distortion is very real and audible but I guess Eric is making a point of if you have an analog EQ and you're just using it at nominal levels if you think youre getting something extra out of it than just the EQ curve you may be only hearing a difference in your head. 50 Analog eq's at nominal levels in a mix over 50 matched Pro Q3's in a mix? I would hope the difference would be audible then, but IDK.
The audiophile world : hahahahahahaha. People are so easy to fool.
I can't hear any difference. I obviously haven't spent enough on gear... 🤣🤣🤣
Yeah, stuff gets controversial when money has been spent. Another one I've gotten heat from is pointing out "bass traps" on the web most of the time refers to treatment that actually wont trap the bass, more than maybe a lucky 10% efficiency under 150hz
Depends where on the web. If you go to gearspace for e.g. everyone's pretty clued up that traps need to be a good 50cm + thick to do anything useful, that the material needs to be low density etc.
The issue is where the hobbyist/audiophile community is often not as rigorous with their understandings as the pro audio communities.
@@Hankblue 50cm "to do anything useful" is a stretch to say the least. porous absorber calculator has 20 cm absorbing 70% at 100hz with an equal cm air gap. More low end absorption than 50cm without air gap
@@merlinproductions7374 a) The OP was talking about bass traps. Getting 70% @ 100hz isn't good for a bass trap at all, you're barely doing anything to the sub.
b) Those air gap calculations make the assumption that the sides are close to sealed, they're not reliable. Go ahead and calculate what a 20cm absorber with a 200cm air gap would do, it will tell you you're getting 80% absorption at 40hz. You won't get that.
c) Even setting aside the nebulous air gap calculations, you still won't get more absorption with 20cm + 20cm air gap than 50cm if you pick the right air flow resistivity. You seem to just be using the same resistivity for both scenarios, which is just not how this works.