Why isn't there an "Amp in the room" IR?

geetarplayer

geetarplayer

Experienced
You know... you play through a FRFR, and it sounds like an amp in the room.

Sometimes you just need to expose your ignorance with a question. So, tell me why that doesn't even make sense.
 
Because an amp in the room sound comes from a speaker bouncing in an actual room. It's the "surround sound" quality that gives the sensation. It can't come from a single point like a speaker to your left.

Just turn up your FRFR and have it bounce around the room like an amp would.
 
Also most of the IRs are captured by a microphone. That kind of makes the microphone part of the sound.
 
geetarplayer said:
You know... you play through a FRFR, and it sounds like an amp in the room.

Sometimes you just need to expose your ignorance with a question. So, tell me why that doesn't even make sense.
Click to expand...

What you are describing is actually an IR that has "no room", i.e. contains no boundary reflections.

IR's like this, when played back, the FRFR is the amp, and the room you are in, is the room :) voila, amp in the room :) The IR is just the response of the speaker free from any room sound.

It is expensive and difficult to obtain IR's like this. It takes special equipment, special environment, and special skills (more likely from someone skilled at testing and designing loudspeakers vs. recording engineers).

The vast majority of IR's are captured just like a recording session. This still requires skill and equipment. But gear for recording guitar amps, and good recording engineers out number loudspeaker test facilities and loudspeaker test experts.
 
they do exist but it seems most companies do not include them. the redwirez ir's normally have stereo room ir's that you can mix with the other ir's. not sure what is going on with this company though as it seems they do no updates anymore. You would also need to run stereo to get the effect of those ir's. I think reverb and maybe the use of the proximity effect makes up for this anyway.
 
It is definitely possible to get extremely close to an amp-in-the-room experience using far field IRs and an FRFR rig. One day I expect I will put some sort of far field 'cab pack' together. I have higher priorities though, as I have an album to make! One day, when that's all finished :)
 
i think a stereo IR captured with something like the Neumann KU100 would come closest to the "amp in the room" thing.
however if i understand correctly the AXE FX II can not handle IR's that are too long and capruring "room" requires a longer IR,
i could be wrong of course, but it seems logical to me.
 
Soultrash said:
i think a stereo IR captured with something like the Neumann KU100 would come closest to the "amp in the room" thing.
however if i understand correctly the AXE FX II can not handle IR's that are too long and capruring "room" requires a longer IR,
i could be wrong of course, but it seems logical to me.
Click to expand...

I posted about that a while back and after some discussion I don't think that's correct.

IR's like that would only be good listening with headphones or in-ears.

The HRTF of the player comes from our own ears / head. No need to duplicate that with a binaural microphone.

YACITRT (yet another cab in the room thread): https://www.thegearpage.net/board/i...ught-on-that-cab-in-the-room-feeling.1547107/

We have the player / listener, a speaker, and a room we are playing in. The missing link is the uncolored IR that is not captured close miked.
 
that's why i wrote that using a KU100 might come closest to the amp in the room sound,
at least much closer than people trying to create the amp in the room sounds with cab+mic
IR's that represent the exact opposite ;)

a neutral microphone with an omnidirectional pattern will also come way closer to the human ear
than any other microphone/recording technique.

in general i think that the "amp in the room" sound is a mix of frequency response of the room
and how it's affected by the volume of the amp, which can not be simulated on studio speakers,
FRFR etc. as playing an amp on fairly low volume will certainly not give that specific sound.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Don't forget, a good IR is just capturing the sweet spot of a speaker (at least we want to do it that way)
It's not the representation of the whole frequencies given by the cab.
While sounding perfectly focused on what we want to hear, when miked, the other "not-so-sweet" spots have a huge impact to the sound "in the room"

I would not use Far Field IRs to get this, I would use mid-field Irs that capture the speaker from a distance of 9 to 12 " - before most of the floor reflections phase the signal "to death" .

In some of our "Pos.3" IRs (our more experimental settings) this can help you to find this, when mixed to the close mic IRs. The rest should come from your FRFR and the room.
 
Take a good close miced IR that's not too bright, and play it through a powerful pa speaker, and there it is.
 
funkstation777 said:
While sounding perfectly focused on what we want to hear, when miked, the other "not-so-sweet" spots have a huge impact to the sound "in the room"
Click to expand...

yeah that's basically what i have tried to say!

btw i have checked out the Valhallir free pack and it contains some of the best IR's i have heard so far! :)
funnily the Wolverine, which i thought to like the most is the last one i would pick from this pack,
still curious if the other IR's from ths pack sound different or closer to the example IR.
 
When we created the teaser pack, it was pretty hard to decide, which Irs to take, because there are so many great ones in each pack. :)
The Wolverine is a very special and unique sounding cab. It's my "baby" and in the meantime used by many pro's around the globe, which makes us very proud.
 
It might not be correct in terms of physics and such. While perhaps not capturing the room so much, a distant mic ir still helps.

The free redwirez 1960 ir-pack has a folder with ‘ambient mics’.

When you combine a cab mic’ed 5ft away with a close mic’ed cab in a stereo cab block, you can get some of that amp-in-the-room feel with just a little bit of tinkering. Just adjust the mix of the two ir’s to taste, and you might get your goose bumps going.
 
All you get is phase problems. If you want to have more "room", just add a good reverb (there is plenty of it in the axefx)
An IR with 170ms length is not really doing a "room"-job, IMHO. If you add some room IRs with 500 ms length via audio workstation, you would get some nice ambient content. But not in a hardware player at this time. And the Axe is still the tool with the longest IRs with its 170 ms.
 
funkstation777 said:
All you get is phase problems. If you want to have more "room", just add a good reverb (there is plenty of it in the axefx)
An IR with 170ms length is not really doing a "room"-job, IMHO. If you add some room IRs with 500 ms length via audio workstation, you would get some nice ambient content. But not in a hardware player at this time. And the Axe is still the tool with the longest IRs with its 170 ms.
Click to expand...
I'll add, pre-convolution 500ms IR files look pretty on the screen, but once you deconvolve them and listen to them head to head with the same mic in the same position on the same cab close mic in a properly treated room, you won't hear a difference between 500ms and 170ms with most FRFR and most studio monitors in most rooms where people perform or listen to music.

Baking reflective or lively room characteristics into an IR totally defeats the purpose of an IR. Then when you are playing through it, you are hearing that baked in room in addition to the room where your FRFR or studio monitors are reproducing the sound. It almost gives you an audio version of a Moebius strip where you are hearing room sound on top of room sound. If the room where the IR is recorded is a little more lively sounding, the 500ms IR will take on the characteristics of the room in such a way, that when you play it back in your room, unless you are listening in an anechoic chamber, your brain starts to interpret it more as a reverb that you can't dial out more than the sensation of pushing air with a cranked cab.

I did 3 months of extensive testing on these concepts in various environments before I put out my Silver & Black Volume 1 collection. I am sure @funkstation777 did similar testing as well as others in the industry. If there was a way to simulate that feeling at lower volumes through a speaker other than by sheer brute force off-axis volume, the recording industry would have pimped that technique for all it's worth years ago. Even if you play in a 5.1 surround array, the feeling is just not there unless you are listening off axis and pushing a lot of volume.

If you want more room, turn up the room parameter in the cab block and adjust the mic spacing for the size of your head,or adjust the wet mix on your reverb and play at gig level volume.

If you want the rumble of the cab pushing air in your IR, mix in either a mic in back of cab IR or a PZM IR in small amounts of the cab to get the rumble. Mix in too much of either option and it sounds like you are playing in a pizza box or a bad demo.

At this point the only reason I am producing 500ms IR files is that people ask me to produce them.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom