Pick the real amp...

erockomania said:
I believe you agreed with me when I said that once you are told what to listen for it's easier to critically listen. Now you are calling those people stupid (in not so many words). Nice.

There are two outcomes here. The Axe is obviously good enough and if you really pay attention you might be able to hear something that extremely hard to describe as long as you know where to focus your attention. Then again, maybe you can't and that's fine too. In the end, it clearly doesn't matter much.
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I did not call people stupid. I called this situation stupid and weird.

Yes I agree with you that if you point out something, f.ex. a spice used in a food, it helps people notice it. That's not what I'm talking about though. The golden ear thing simply does not apply to electric guitars. Like I said before, distorted guitars are not demanding in their dynamics nor their range. Therefore "I think I hear it now" is most likely reverse-Placebo.

erockomania said:
if you really pay attention you might be able to hear something... maybe you can't.
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80% of voters in this thread didn't hear it. I'm very confident that if this was a blindfold test for you too, you wouldn't be able to notice the real amp.
 
Nobody said it was easy, Mikko. But I would also bet that nobody here thinks the Axe is 100% there. Close enough to not matter to the majority of folks, you bet. Including me.
 
Personal remarks are a sign of people starting to use their last lifelines. You guys need to step up your game. I think we all know I would win that game, if I needed to. :)
erockomania said:
Nobody said it was easy, Mikko. But I would also bet that nobody here thinks the Axe is 100% there. Close enough to not matter to the majority of folks, you bet. Including me.
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Out of curiousity, have you ever miked a cabinet and shot an IR with mic+di and compared the two together?

I don't think you know "where" the Axe-Fx is if you've never done this test.
 
5150 said:
IF someone is saying that it has a recognizable imprint, the way to test for that would be a double blind test against the real amp(s).
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I have to disagree with that. The assertion has been that the Axe has a recognizable imprint. Not a particular amp, or effect, or cab, or IR, but the entire unit. So that imprint should persist regardless of how you change the variables.

So how do you test that? Play a bunch of different models, with different cabs and effects, in a situation where nobody knows if a clip is even an Axe or a real amp. If there's a signature, then people should be able point to it and say, "Aha, that clip has the signature - it's the Axe".

Maybe it was a mistake even playing the same riff, with the amp and the models dialed in to sound similiar. It might have been an even more powerful test if every single clip was uniquely different, playing a different riff on an obviously different amp model with different gain levels. If people could accurately pick out the real amp(s) in that situation, that would be pretty conclusive proof of an Axe "imprint".
 
Also, if you're diagnosing a problem, then changing only one parameter at a time is 100% the way to go. If there was a signature, then that would be the only way to find what was causing it.

But if you want to prove that a signature exists, you need to do the opposite. Vary as much as possible and see if some element of the sound stays constant through those changes.
 
Try to mic up a real amp and cab ten times in a row and get the exact same tone each time. Trying to get the Axe to sound exactly the same as a tube amp is an exercise in futility since no two tube amps sound exactly the same.
 
I don't get why so many people get so worked up about this. I thought this was a great thread, so I just want to say thanks to the OP for the effort. I'm not really broken up one way or the other if someone eventually proves a signature tell on the axe. First, if it's there, I can't hear it as it is now and almost no one else can. Second, if someone does find it and prove it, Cliff will just find a way to fix it like he does for everything else. If it's algorithm related he'll fix it on this model. If it's hardware related, he'll fix it on the next model. So it's basically win win.
 
ML SOUND LAB said:
Personal remarks are a sign of people starting to use their last lifelines. You guys need to step up your game. I think we all know I would win that game, if I needed to. :)
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Lol. There is the old Mikko. Same egomaniac as always just trying to dial it back so he can sell more cabs without pissing too many people off.

There were no personal insults. Not sure where you got that but jeez, it didn't take much to get you to act like the old Clark Kent. Bravo.
 
haffner1 said:
I don't get why so many people get so worked up about this. I thought this was a great thread, so I just want to say thanks to the OP for the effort. I'm not really broken up one way or the other if someone eventually proves a signature tell on the axe. First, if it's there, I can't hear it as it is now and almost no one else can. Second, if someone does find it and prove it, Cliff will just find a way to fix it like he does for everything else. If it's algorithm related he'll fix it on this model. If it's hardware related, he'll fix it on the next model. So it's basically win win.
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Totally agreed. I think if we hear what we think we hear, so does he and he's probably already working on it. There have been probably 15 revisions after folks have said it's 99% there. Then he finds a few more things that were off and suddenly it's... 99% there again. He will get there. No doubt in my mind. And folks that say it is there already will wonder what's changed in a new revision. How could it be better? :)
 
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It's funny how some that can't hear the difference are okay with that while others figure, "I can't hear it so whoever did is full of shit"...
The scratchiness is in there, believe it or not, like it or not. Is it so bad the Axe sucks and I want to sell it? Hell no.

Face it guys...it isn't perfect. Doesn't matter if no two amps are the same.....that has nothing to do with it. You can do a billion more test to try to prove otherwise. Knock yourself out. And the end of the day I know what I heard, so stop trying to shit on people with this superior attitude.
 
StickMan said:
Also, if you're diagnosing a problem, then changing only one parameter at a time is 100% the way to go. If there was a signature, then that would be the only way to find what was causing it.

But if you want to prove that a signature exists, you need to do the opposite. Vary as much as possible and see if some element of the sound stays constant through those changes.
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This is not true when asking humans to evaluate audio.

Human hearing and human perception of sound will skew the results when something as simple as apparent loudness is changed.
 
barhrecords said:
This is not true when asking humans to evaluate audio.

Human hearing and human perception of sound will skew the results when something as simple as apparent loudness is changed.
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The question here is about the approach. The quality of the test equipment isn't relevant.

The fact remains, if all of the other variables were held constant, and just the amp model varied, then the only thing you'd be able to say was that one of that particular set elements caused a "signature" in the Axe. Maybe the signature was caused by the particular pickup interacting with that particular Axe configuration?

Conversely, if nobody was able to identify a signature, then you could say that particular case was a peculiar instance where the signature was masked by one or more of the elements. Since the test seemed to indicate that no signature was detected, I'm a little surprised that nobody has posted something along the lines of, "Well of course you can't hear a signature on a medium gain clip with a mesa-like model and a 4x12 IR and humbuckers - try yada yada and you'll hear it for sure".

The biggest weakness I saw in this exercise was in the voting. Lots of people said, "I can't tell, but I like number X the most", so the votes were allocated a little oddly. Also, I'd bet that at least some people were influenced by other people's comments and votes. It would have been a little more rigorous if it had been a proper forum voting thread, where people couldn't see the results until after they had voted. And comments moderated to remove peoples choices.
 
What i learned in this thread , and thanks to the OP.

1)The riffs and playing was great , I need to practice more.

2)I could not pick the real amp ,My fav in the mix like many others was #2

3) even after the real amp was revealed if i was in the control room with the producer on playback I would still have taken #2 as it was the best guitar sound to my ears regardless or real or modelled.

4) only after pointed out that scratchy sound on the low end attack could I slightly hear it and it didn't bother me , although I bet Cliff is possibly conducting his own tests right now to isolate and improve it .

so thanks again was a good one
 
erockomania said:
Lol. There is the old Mikko. Same egomaniac as always just trying to dial it back so he can sell more cabs without pissing too many people off.

There were no personal insults. Not sure where you got that but jeez, it didn't take much to get you to act like the old Clark Kent. Bravo.
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The old Mikko lol
on the video he didn't look old
guess i missed something ;)
 
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