Something Cool I've Been Working On

You can basically trial what the difference in tone is now, right?

If you have a DAW and an IR loader and some 3rd party IRs such as ownhammer, Step 1 is to record your playing through the conventional Axe-fx IR. Step 2 is to bypass the Axe-fx cab sim, load the same IR (but the WAV version) into the loader record a new track. Step 3 - compare.
 
Swedish Chef said:
Awesome work as usual, Cliff! This will surely add to the character of each IR. However, while the IR certainly is going to sound more natural, I'm sure, it may not always sound better or give you a more workable guitar tone in the end. Lot of the issues with recording a guitar amp IRL is precisely that of the resonating bass frequencies in the room. We are talking about a boost in bass frequencies of up to 5-10 dB with a Q factor of roughly 1/6 octave. Sounds to me like it may cause resonance issues in particular lower frequencies. Slow resonating frequencies are tougher to control than faster ones, especially at volume, and usually cause a boomy quality... Usually this is dealt with in mixing and with EQ... I'll have to listen to this to be fully convinced that this is a step forward across the entire range of guitar tones. It may definitely help certain types of tones, such as raunchy Vox or Marshall tones, while it can make higher gain tones and deep super clean tones boomier and not as tight as before. But what the heck do I know???? :) In either case I'm super excited to try this out!!! :encouragement: Your continuous strive for perfection makes us, all of us I'm sure, proud to be Fractalians! Great work Cliff! :encouragement:
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That'd be 100% dependent on the room it was captured in, correct? This is precisely one reason why pro studio recordings of amps almost always sound better than some guy at home in his bedroom doing it; proper rooms.

I'll lay odds the high end 'mix' IR's from the latest generation of IR's - assuming they can be converted to the longer sample length and format that UltraRes will be using - will no doubt bear this out to an even higher degree. It's not only the speaker, but the mic, the mic position, the mic preamp and the room. Now... we'll hear that to an almost clone of the actual response given the graphs as presented.

Bring it on. More accurate = better. I'm all for it.
 
Very interesting. Am I correct in thinking that these new cabs would contain frequency response data only, and not reproduce early reflections as an IR would (in the time domain), but would contain frequency response deviations due to the influence of the room in which the cab was captured?
 
FractalAudio said:
Existing IRs will still be processed as usual. UltraRes IRs will be tagged as such which will indicate to the processor to use the new processing algorithms. Note that UltraRes IR data is not conventional IR data.
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At first I was thinking this would 'enhance' existing IRs. But no. So your IRs will be rather exclusive, in a few ways. One wonders whether this will influence other producers of IRs?...Or perhaps not because of trademark?...Or will it end up being just another part of Axe usage, like the current stock IRs? Also, if originally long enough, couldn't any prior IR be 'modified' to accommodate this?
 
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I would guess the captures are going to be the same but longer, and there might be a conversion tool for the new format from fractal.
 
Guys, fractalaudio is referring to the length of the SYX version of the IRs, which are merely a collection of samples, and truncated from the WAV version of the IR

the WAV files for the redwirez are 46ms long....Maybe there will be issues in converting those,, The Ownhammer ones are 100ms long!!
 
Oh boy!
When ever Cliff is thinking of something cool, it either makes me spend money or re-tweak all my presets... ;)

I do approve however, carry on... carry on...
 
Here are some of my comparisons of short vs. longer IRs. These look very different from Cliff's for a few reasons - mostly capture method (these are far-fields) and the room in which the IRs were captured.

These are IRs of a Hartke 4x10 bass cabinet. The blue line is a 1024 point IR which is free of room reflections for 20ms (oops!). The green line is a 42 ms IR with room reflections from 20-42 ms as you can see in the top box. I should point out that these are the same IR, only the blue one is a truncated version.

As this is a bass cab, I was surprised to find that the difference in the very low frequencies between the two IRs is actually quite small. The room reflections seem to be making the biggest difference to the frequency response of the two IRs, which result in deviations in amplitude response across the whole spectrum. These deviations continue to increase with longer IR lengths.

From looking at this I am still of the opinion that 1024 point IRs are adequate for accurately replicating the direct sound of a cabinet (i.e. on its own, with no room influence). However, if you are looking to have the tone of the room the cab was recorded in baked into the cab file, it would appear that Cliff's new method is vastly superior, not to mention more efficient. If this new method purely contains frequency response data as I expect it does, it may have an additional advantage of not 'blurring' notes with early reflections (i.e. very short reverb) as longer IRs can in some cases.
 

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Looks like more ways to expand the Axe-perience. I've been using Axe models and real amps with the Axe lately, these new IRs with a real amp, or pedal, could be a lot of fun.
 
Very Interesting! Looking forward to seeing whether accuracies in the sub 120hz will be useful. Does this bring more accuracy overall? Never going to knock more accuracy!!
 
Looks to me like this would tighten up the low frequency response (punchier more defined low end). Sounds like a winner to me!

Cliff do you ever sleep when you’re not eating, breathing or shiting bits and bytes?
 
Seems like a pretty awesome upgrade/enhancement :)

( * my response was designed to camouflage the fact that I don't really understand the full magnitude of this enhancement * )

LOL

Thanks for all your work Cliff
 
Cliff is a briliant example of genius that our world doesn't have anymore! Keep researching your work and showing your great intelect.
 
What about the impact on the sound? IF a cab has a different bass response, I dial that in to fit my sound-preference. I think I will do same with new IRs. So what is the difference? Other than they sound "more" like the real cab. - AAEN
 
AAEN said:
What about the impact on the sound? IF a cab has a different bass response, I dial that in to fit my sound-preference. I think I will do same with new IRs. So what is the difference? Other than they sound "more" like the real cab. - AAEN
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They won't sound more like the real cab itself - they will be influenced more significantly by the room the cab was recorded in.
 
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