What About a "Cabinet Nullifier" Block?

StickMan

Experienced
Something occurred to me while reading another thread. I can think of two situations that probably occur all the time:
  1. AxeFX user has FRFR speakers, but they're not quite FRFR. Patches don't sound the same when shared around. User has issues with "everything sounds dark...", and so on.
  2. AxeFX user has guitar/bass cabinet. Would like to use cabinet with IR's to get sound of various other cabinets.
Wouldn't it be cool if you could stick a mic in front of the cabinet, hook it up to the AxeFX and have the AxeFX do something a bit like a "Tone Match" to compensate for the frequency response of the cabinet to flatten it out so that it could be used much like an FRFR cabinet?
 
Whenever I read people having issues like you mentioned in your two points, I just assume they don't know how to use the Axe FX. If you're using FRFR, those speakers are either FRFR or they aren't. There isn't "not quite FRFR". If it sounds dark, something's not configured correctly or the user just has dark sounding pickups/guitar. And using IRs + guitar cab is just meh. You're not getting the "sound of various other cabinets", you're mixing the tonal characteristics of your cabinet and the IR together. That's like mixing blue and yellow paint (making green obviously) together and saying, "this is yellow paint."

EDIT: Retracting my FRFR statement. I agree with the posts below this one about FRFR speakers all sounding different. I think I made that comment with the thought that FRFR speakers generally don't have as much tone coloration as a guitar cabinet. What I meant was that FRFR speakers/studio monitors, while they're not all created equal, should get you at least 90% there for tone.
 
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I think a majority of the "less than FRFR" comes down to things like differences in guitars, pups, the users hearing sensitivity, room acoustics, output volume etc

A 20 year old playing a bright maple tele at gig volumes is going to think a given patch sounds far different than a 60 year old with 4 decades of noise exposure, playing a dark LP, with dead strings, and listening at late-night volume.

Tone simply isn't quite variable which can be accounted for, but the overall chain of everything, including how someone attacks the strings. Can't really normalize it. I kind of like the fact that two guys can play the exact same patch and still sound totally different. Its one of the things that keeps music less generic
 
I actually did this when I first got my Axe-Fx. I had a cheap FRFR monitor that I tone matched, using a reference mic, to a direct 'Pink Noise' signal to make it flatter. It took several attempts, but ended up working pretty well. I also tone matched it to my JBL-PRX 615 Main PA cabs, which also turned out to sound quite similar.

The only real drawback was, It ate up one of my available IRs in every preset. I stopped doing this once I got some decent monitors.

You could, in theory, use a similar approach to 'Flatten' a guitar cab? But the limitations of that Cab/speaker combo, like overall frequency response, dispersion pattern, difference in miked and 'in-the-room' sound, miking position, etc........ would make it difficult to do.
 
You're not getting the "sound of various other cabinets", you're mixing the tonal characteristics of your cabinet and the IR together. That's like mixing blue and yellow paint (making green obviously) together and saying, "this is yellow paint."

I disagree. As long as the elements involved respond in a linear fashion you should be able to add their effects together to get a "net" effect. All I proposing is that there is a block which EQ's the signal equal and opposite to the non-flatness of the physical cabinet - resulting in a net flat response -> to which the IR can be added.

Granted, there would be limits, and difficulties in measuring the non-flatness of a guitar cabinet that would depend on mic placement and so forth. But theoretically, it could be done - sort of an anti-IR for the physical cabinet.

It would probably work well for cabinets that are close to FRFR to start with.
 
I'm not sure I agree with putting this thread in this forum. This isn't about user cabs or IR's. I think it better belongs in the main AxeII discussion forum.
 
I disagree. Many speakers claim to be flat. Put a bunch of them side by side and find me any two that sound the same.
Totally agree.

Even high end professional studio monitors have response differences you can clearly hear when doing a controlled A/B test.
Indeed!!!

Put a set of UREI far fields in a room, then switch them out for a set of Westlakes, then switch them out for a set of Tannoys.

They all claim to be flat in the most tuned room possible, but they all have certain frequency peaks and troughs as well as imaging anomalies.

Switch them to another "flat" room and you are going to get a different experience.

That last 5-10% of reproducible flat response in all listening environments is a holy grail that people have been chasing since the 1970's, if not the 1930's by some accounts.

Unfortunately the physics and acoustics of different environments and different brains with different mileage in their organs of Corti will make this an elusive target until we can beam the signal directly into our brains' listening center and bypass all this crude pistoning of magnets, flapping paper, vibrating strings of air, waving hairs, and firing of neurons.
 
We did a workshop named "Pimp my FRFR" in 2013 at the Axefest Germany in Leipzig.
We took a db technologies Flexsys FM12a, the Room-EQ-Wizard Software (Freeware) and a good measure mike (but even a Behringer ECM8000 can do the job) and took a "look" at the frequency chart of the monitor. With several peq-blocks we improved the frequency response of the monitor. With the correction curve settings (the peg-blocks preset has been downloaded countless of times in the last years for many Flexsys' that have been bought by AxeFx-users) we didn't "even" the frequency curve at all...we just made it sound more "expensive" , and the users were able to trust the IRs coming out of the monitor more than before.
Most of the time, the crossover frequency from the woofer to the tweeter is the main problem. If you are able to even this area a bit, you can "trust" your monitor a little more. But, depending on the location, it still will sound different.

I suggest to listen to your sound on many different systems to get a "feeling" for your sound. From the very expensive superduper-studio monitor to the Ling-Ling supercheapo.
 
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