I'll answer your questions here.
Just purchased and have spent an hour playing around with it. Nice pack Mikko. Sounds great. My favourite cab is the Mesa Traditional and can be hard to find a lot of packs based on it so good you have come back for a second go at this one.
The DREAM mix is great, and very similar to your ML USA TRAD IR, which I understand is one of the 57/421 mixes from Cab Pack 7. But the Dream mix is still different enough - more open and raw sounding, definitely with more high end information. Would probably cut in a mix a bit better.
Love the layout of the pack, with each mic having a handful of shots with different brightness levels. Very easy to navigate and use.
Dropping in the 57-A, the 121-A and the 431-A together sounds great especially if dialing down the 121 and 421 mix in the cab block by 4-9db depending on taste. Using any of the 57’s with any of the 121’s also sounds fantastic with no other tweaking needed. Great out of the box. Another thing to try is adding the DREAM mix with the Petrucci IR and dialling down the DREAM by about 8db. Adds some brightness back to this cab while not taking away from the core Petrucci sound (although I will still likely use the Petrucci cab as is and bump up the 6600hz slider a bit which is what I do now).
Glad I have another piece of this cab.
Can I ask, is the DREAM mix a blending of some of the other IRs or was it a real world capture with multiple mics? What was the setup?
Also, I am findIng using an IR length of 512 sounds better to me. Do you have any curves on where early reflections are with the different IRs in this pack? Would be interested in knowing where this occurs to better dial it in (as per a recent discussion on the forum led by Cliff).
Tried this with Firmware 10.2. Have not tried it with the new impedance curves in FW 11 yet. I imagine the Mesa Small would be the curve to use? Have you tried it and have any suggestions?
Cheers
Thank you so much for the awesome feedback. The whole reconstruction of the Cab Pack architecture for 2019 came from user feedback and it quickly became evident that if an IR pack has more than ~50 IR's then the user was not going to spend time scrolling through them. We've kind of slipped away from that with these releases with several speakers but still the way these packs are now made focuses on usability and the feedback has been much like your experience has been.
About "reflections", "limiting IR lengths" and "impedance curves". That's a hat-trick with three things that I would advice everyone to try and ignore. That's mainly because they're new topics at the moment and right now I would say there's a lot of misunderstanding around what these actually are and people are committing to these things while they're more or less insignificant.
First of all the trend of talking about early reflections and IR's originates from one questionably biased source who has provided zero proof that "getting rid of reflections" is in any way better than what we have now. There was a point this year when he admitted it wasn't better.. but then it was... and then it wasn't again.. but then it was... so I chose to start ignoring that conversation because this is the truth about reflections = THEY ARE GOOD. Every guitar track you have ever heard has reflections in it because real mics on real cabs in real studios capture early reflections. You hearing a real cabinet in the room has reflections in it. The worry about using an FRFR setup playing IR's with reflections in the room so you'd be getting double reflections. What this means is that getting rid of reflections can only apply to trying to mimic a similar size cabinet as your FRFR setup and how it would sound in your room. So that's why that particular topic is mainly about 1x12 boxes. Also IIRC you can't capture reflectionless IR's from cabs with more than one speaker in it so since 90% of people mainly use 4x12 IR's and don't own 4x12 size FRFR setups there's really no point in diving deeper into this. I'm starting to feel I dove in too deep already.
What I'm saying is, capturing a sound without early reflections is something most people have never heard before therefore chances are that it'll sound and react in a way that has never been heard before and that usually leads to people not liking that sound.
Limiting IR length: One of the main things that sets Fractal above it's competition is that it has UltraRes that's (I think) 8192 length ~170ms at 48khz. If you compare that to Line 6 Helix then their longest supported IR is 2048 which is ~43ms at 48khz. Here's a list of my export options from my custom IR shoot software so I could essentially produce IR's that are way above this quality range.
So when I hear people talk about shortening the IR like you said 512 (I can't even export a quality that low) you're essentially saying that you want ~11ms IR's. That's like saying that you want a 1 megapixel camera on your phone when you could have a 16 megapixel camera (UltraRes format is 16 times 512) - obviously without the noise problems you get with too much megapixels on a phone camera, just using it as a comparison. This all boils down to the purpose of the IR format. It is extremely powerful at recreating what a mic picks up in a very nice room. We spend a lot of time ensuring that the information is pristine. Here's a video where I talk about IR length:
Impedance curves are the real deal though unlike the reflection talk. That's a real thing and I work around that topic a lot. I have that information for all the packs since I use real tube amps to shoot IR's unlike most IR producers. In many cases it just seems like the people who ask for this information do not fully understand what they're asking for. This is not necessarily a problem - I just think it would be bad customer support for me to give people information without explaining what it actually is and right now based on some of the videos that people have been posting about the new FW11 I think most people don't have a clear idea of what it actually is. I think Cliff did a good job with the impedance measurements. I'm still on FW10... I promised myself I'd wait 3 weeks for a stable FW before I update since the speed is getting a bit much to me personally. I updated the FW10 a day before FW11 was released so.... yeah...
Wow this one took a long time.
