Parallel chain with shunt adds gain ?

Thomas Obester

Experienced
I noticed Very strange thing.
Attached is the preset as example.
Please chugg a bit with this sound, then remove the shunt block in parallel chain.
You will notice, the gain drops quite a lot (feels like at least 25% or even more).
The more shunt blocks you add in paralel chains, the more gain you will get.
I would say the shunts should not change the sound in any way.
@FractalAudio is this normal behavior ?
 

Attachments

  • Paralell chain adds gain test.syx
    48.2 KB · Views: 8
Perfectly as designed.

Think of shunts as pipes letting more unity gain sound thru (or as separate buffers that each have unity gain). It's different than parallel wiring in the physical world.

Edit: I'm trying to find that in the manual and haven't yet.
 
Last edited:
IIRC each (shunted) signal path in the grid maintains unity gain. If you split a path into two parallel paths, each path is at unity gain and when they are reunited they are summed at that point. So the net volume increases (by 6 dB).

But I'll let others chime in to to confirm or not.
 
Last edited:
Found this from 9 years ago:

https://forum.fractalaudio.com/thre...-in-a-parallel-row-increase-the-volume.48543/

Unlike mentioned in that thread, shunts are not actual buffers but act like buffers in their summing behavior. In the digital realm, the signal is simply passed through (shunted) and summed at the input of any block. There is no buffering op-amp or any processing. The manual says "A shunt is a sonically transparent block—a mere tool which carries signal through otherwise empty grid locations."
 
Last edited:
So any time I build a preset with parallel routing, I have to retweak gain in amp block ? Or what is the best approach to this ?

Depends on scenario. Usually parallel stuff like drives are used one-at-a-time, or in the case of delay/reverb multiple can be turned on as desired. In the latter case there can be a volume increase but in the wet signal.

In your situation, say you have 3 different drives in parallel in front of the amp but are only using one at a time, make sure the Bypass mode is set to Mute or you will get unintended passthrough (and volume/gain increase).

I only hear more gain, level-wise it stays the same.

If the amp is saturating, that's what will happen.
 
I'm trying to understand why one would use a shunt in parallel. I use othrr effects in parallel, and sometimes they have shunts with them, but the effect itself is set to a bypass mode that mutes, which effectively keeps that row from adding anything when you bypass the shunt. Interested to know if there is something I'm missing as far as how having a parallel shunt could be useful.
 
I'm trying to understand why one would use a shunt in parallel. I use othrr effects in parallel, and sometimes they have shunts with them, but the effect itself is set to a bypass mode that mutes, which effectively keeps that row from adding anything when you bypass the shunt. Interested to know if there is something I'm missing as far as how having a parallel shunt could be useful.
I have preset where my first block has pitch block and in parallel there´s second pitch block.
I was tweaking my sound and deleted the parallel chain and noticed that my amp sound changed, hence why I created this thread to found out why.
 
I have preset where my first block has pitch block and in parallel there´s second pitch block.
I was tweaking my sound and deleted the parallel chain and noticed that my amp sound changed, hence why I created this thread to found out why.
That is a scenario where having the parallel pitch block should have the bypass state in one of the mute options, so when you bypass the block it mutes instead of adding the level of that row.
 
very helpful, as everybody else´s contributon in this thread :)
I own fractal products for years and years and I am still learning everyday. :)
I've been using it since the original Ultra and have been doing sound engineering since way before then and still learn new stuff about this thing all the time. It is fairly easy to-do the basics, bit way beyond deep once you start digging in.

Enjoy the tweaking process!
 
I was wondering for quite some time, why my preset has always more gain compared to any other preset, whenever I loaded from my block libraries my favourite amp block settings...duh...now I know !
 
Back
Top Bottom