They All Sound the Same Part Deux

mixermang said:
gain mismatch no, but with tubes you have the time element, bias excursion time. where there are multiple cascading time based elements of distortion if they are exactly the same in a simulation they would be missing a lot of harmonic content, vs if each stage excursion time is offset with each their real world component tolerance variation, all the resistors/capacitors used to manipulate and control each gain stage. with the preamp it's really infinitesimal variances part to part but you can hear it when they are exactly the same vs if they are offset with real world component tolerance variation one to the next
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Is this a workplace disagreement or do you work for another modeler? Just curious
 
Bruce Sokolovic said:
My ex father in law had quite a nice collection and let me tell you it sounded like a cat being swung around by its tail. He got home from work and sat down with the guitar and just loved playing. In my opinion, mission accomplished. If you love playing and an 8000 dollar les Paul or a 2500 dollar modeler makes you happy and you have the cash, you definitely deserve it.
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You sure that he wasn't doing it to torture your mother-in-law? :p
 
Forever Again said:
Is this a workplace disagreement or do you work for another modeler? Just curious
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i'm just fascinated by the complexity of how everything works, AFX3 is like a playground and gets me obnoxiously inquisitive to how/why/what in the circuits and how they interact/feel, FAS is as direct as it gets when it comes to customer interaction and feedback, i use all the modelers at the same time but AFX3 is a lot more than just a modeller, way more, cause of all the circuit adjustment that's open to the user
 
AndyTNBD said:
Yeah. Until you play a single palm mute. 😂
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Or a low, ringing note and hear the Kemper response flatten out, cutting a relatively significant chunk of the note booming out.. hard to always hear, at times very obvious, usually easy to feel.. same thing over and over and over and over... I almost have gear trauma trying to fix that, years with Kemper, profiling 20037829 times and refining 7472829 times.

With fractal stuff, I don't see that. Even when an amp sim is further away from my own amp, in some ways, I usually find the differences more tolerable than that imparted by my profiles.
 
arw said:
I love kempers but once you've owned one you get that kemper feeling everytime you hear or play one. Quite distinctive character.
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Yeah and they're good for what they do. I just happen to dislike this "Kemper feel" even if it can be quite hard to hear in recordings.

Lugging amps to profile got tiring after some years when I can easily tune fractal amp sims and even think the feel for many amps is better replicated.

Now I don't know about this specific test, but I shot captures with a Cortex. Could very easily tell it apart from source tone in terms of feel in blind tests. I was hoping it was gonna take the Kemper thing a step further -- and maybe it did, in some ways.

But I'm still pretty positive in mostly using an fm3. Usually when I've done my own tests against tube amps, I've been happier at the results of just tweaking the fm3 than profiles or captures, minus some rare cases.

And most of the tests I did myself were before Cygnus, for that matter.
 
mixermang said:
i'm just fascinated by the complexity of how everything works, AFX3 is like a playground and gets me obnoxiously inquisitive to how/why/what in the circuits and how they interact/feel, FAS is as direct as it gets when it comes to customer interaction and feedback, i use all the modelers at the same time but AFX3 is a lot more than just a modeller, way more, cause of all the circuit adjustment that's open to the user
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I think you would really enjoy (if you don't already) doing some tinkering with analogue tube amps and effects units. You might be quite amazed how little difference some component substitutions make. Well-designed analogue electronic circuits (and, ahem, some classic Marshalls ;) ) are incredibly tolerant of big drifts in component value away from the designer's intent, simply because that is in itself good design intent. If you want to make noticeable differences in tone, you are generally talking about making pretty major changes in component value. Way bigger even than pot and electrolytic cap tolerances (Fender mid pot change to Marshall values for the "big mid" sound goes from 10k ohm mid pot to 25k ohm, for instance, but when Marshall dropped from 25k to 22k mid pot due to component availability, I'm not sure anyone really noticed).

Similarly for the "stacking" of complexity of tone, amp designers design to avoid this happening. Believe it or not most of the circuits around tubes or transistors aim to make the tone as invariable as possible when different tube makes are used, and are then coupled through capacitors to make sure close to ideal bias points are preserved as much as possible from stage to stage. And OK, I guess a lot of classic Fender and Marshall designs kind of pushed the limits of the intent of standard circuits published to help audio electronics pioneers get some designs made and products produced. Fender's and Marshall's interest was in musicians making themselves heard on stage, and it turned out the distortion produced by pushing the envelope was interesting sounding enough that we're all still reinventing that wheel 60-70 years on.

I've enjoyed your posts. I am still inquisitive, and was definitely obnoxiously so 25-30 years ago. I have also enjoyed Cliff's replies to them. Might be short, but there are some nuggets of very useful information in there.

Liam
 
Also, listened to the clips last night, but didn't post because I only listened on a laptop, and also didn't want to embarrass myself if I was really wrong about something :D. I suspected the first 2 clips were amp and Fractal because of the decay of the last chord sounding consistent and realistic like a real amp. I think I had them the wrong way around if I'm honest.

3 and 4 have a really artificial sounding late "bloom" going on. 5th one sounds better to me. Still not sure what Brand A refers to...

Liam
 
Soooo.. i own a Quad Cortex
When i tried Cliffs settings on the PV-505 Lead Gain 3, all others noon, Master on 10. On the QC the amp model cleans up a lot , hmm maybe this was not the model he used..

Then i took a CAPTURE of a Real 5150 (factory Capture bank 18 , number 139) and tried to lower the guitar volume... guess what ??
I could not get my guitar to clean up, just like the Axe Fx and the real Amp

What did this tell me.
The capture ( Flagship feature on the Quad Cortex ) is really good

Anyone with the QC can try this
 
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I'd love to get a meow effect in the axe like the korg miku but you know, meows instead of anime girls. Actually a whole set of nature sounds would pair really well with a nice ambient shimmer pad preset.
 
Ummm .... hope this doesn't get me into trouble ....... but to my ears ..... I think Clip 5 "L6" essentially sounds identical to Clip 1 "Axe" ...... Clip 2 is has nicer and a bit tighter and less wooly/woofy low mids / lows than either Clip 1 or Clip 5.

Splitting hairs here but just saying ..... Clip 1, 2 and 5 all sound very excellent though :)

Ben
 
mixermang said:
gain mismatch no, but with tubes you have the time element, bias excursion time. where there are multiple cascading time based elements of distortion if they are exactly the same in a simulation they would be missing a lot of harmonic content, vs if each stage excursion time is offset with each their real world component tolerance variation, all the resistors/capacitors used to manipulate and control each gain stage. with the preamp it's really infinitesimal variances part to part but you can hear it when they are exactly the same vs if they are offset with real world component tolerance variation one to the next
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I appreciate your enthusiasm but you have no idea what you're talking about.
 
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