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Hi Stuart!
The first step is to watch the oscilloscope, and look at what you’re asking it to do with those settings. 🙂
Comparing to VL is apples to oranges — VL wasn’t an FM processor. For a fair comparison with VL, set BBP to 15us pre-emphasis, and set final drive (with Plutonium) to about -3! Then they’ll be roughly the same loudness, and bass should be just as clean.
When pushing for loudness, you can win a lot in the treble and midrange by having a good clipper, like BBP does. In the bass region, however, there’s not that much you can do, because the bass takes a lot of space, and will end up pushing other things into the clipper, causing IM distortion. The only way to avoid the IM distortion is to clip the bass itself lower, and that causes dirty, unimpressive bass.
In short, it’s impossible to squeeze 2 gallons of bass into a 1 gallon jug. Plutonium is loud even default settings, +2.7dB on that preset is simply over the top — the controls have no limitations, your ears must be the judge. If it gets distorted, Final Drive needs to come down. Turning final drive up without turning bass down is essentially *asking* for distortion 🙂
You could try to apply bass cut. This is not actually a filter or EQ, instead it lowers the thresholds for the B1 and B2 AGCs, thus causing less clipping and cleaner bass.
///Leif
Modman, the question is "Where would you like to put it"? 🙂
If you look at the output waveform on the built-in oscilloscope, you’ll see that there is just nowhere for more bass to go. Something else will have to give. What will it be? Loudness? High-end? Midrange? 🙂
///Leif
Hi Adam!
No problem 😉.
The old one was pretty heavy indeed.. Do try the new one! In CPU optimized mode, it’s really not bad.
BBP fatter? It shouldn’t be, but it may have been a little louder, and definitely punchier / cleaner.
///Leif
Awesome!
Can we have some benchmarks from some P4, and some AMD users? Would be very interesting. 🙂
///Leif
An audio file says more than a thousand words.. Or was that a picture? 🙂
Adam, I ripped part of two songs from your stream. I used the wget utility (simply http get utility) so I got the MP3 data bit-for-bit accurate with your stream — no re-encoding.
Then I processed the same two song clips (from an unprocessed MP3 source) with BBP, and encoded to the same bitrate.
Finally, I uploaded the files and made a playlist so you can compare A/B/C.
BBP settings used:
15us pre-emphasis + de-emphasisNYC preset: Final Drive -1.0
Rock preset: Final Drive +0.5http://claessonedwards.com/bbpclips/x10 … amples.pls
http://claessonedwards.com/bbpclips/x10 … amples.m3uCheck it out 🙂.
The clips illustrate the difference quite clearly. To my ears, Breakaway Live strains badly at this loudness level (a simple back-end simply cannot be pushed this hard transparently), whereas BBP does not sound like it’s even breaking a sweat, while keeping the loudness level AND increasing transients (drums in particular).
Listen carefully to the break in the Papa Roach clip too, when he sings on top of the bass. The difference in the IM distortion is astounding.
Disclaimer: I’m not trying to rain on my own parade here 🙂. Breakaway Live is a low cpu, low latency audio processor, and it has its uses, and excels in the things it’s meant to do. Loudness Wars, however, is not something it was meant to do. Breakaway Broadcast, on the other hand, is 😉.
Best regards,
///LeifHi Adam!
I just tuned in now, but it sounds the same.. No transients left, and just too pushed for my taste. 🙁
The simple answer is, if you want to push for loudness (and I can tell, you like it loud!), Breakaway Live is just not the right product. Breakaway Broadcast is the one to use. It will give you this loudness and still retain punch and dynamics. With the latest cpu-efficiency update, it might be feasible — it would be fine to run CPU optimized mode if necessary.
When not pushing for absolute loudness, Breakaway Live will equal or even surpass Breakaway Broadcast, using a fraction of the CPU power. But, when maximum raw loudness is important, there’s only one product that will do the job well.
///Leif
Alright, I spent a few hours trying to track down the issue, and I’m none the wiser.
In fact, it seems that just looking at shoutcast the wrong way makes it drop title streaming. In fact, just a simple dsp muxer is enough to make it fail even when loaded from Winamp.
Since I’ve managed to reproduce it that easily, I’ve posted in the winamp developer forum — let’s hope someone knows the answer. I am stumped.
///Leif
It could be said to be a limitation of either EdCast, or the operating system itself.
When a program requests to open a file without specifying a folder, the system looks for the file in the "Current Directory". Current Directory will be the Breakaway Directory. If you were to load EdCast from Winamp, then the current directory would be the Winamp directory (as opposed to the WinampPlugins directory).
This is the default operating system behaviour. In my programs, I specifically counteract this behaviour, by specifying the path of the executable, every time I open a file. This is why the INI files (for example) will always end up right next to the executable with my programs (unless you’re running Vista with virtualization, but that’s a different story). It’s more complicated for the programmer, but easier for the user to manage, so i do it routinely — but not everyone does.
However, DLL files are pretty small. There’s no harm in placing the appropriate files in the Breakaway folder.
///Leif
Perhaps you can describe in words what you are looking for.
Select the Breakaway Broadcast preset that is closest to the sound you are looking for, and then tell me which preset that is, and what is missing — what you would like to change. I might be able to help then.
Nice, Adam! 🙂
Listening now.
Man, those are pretty agressive settings you’re using though. Watch out for that IM distortion — Breakaway Live does not degrade as gracefully as BBP does when pushed this hard. Might I humbly recommend taking Final Drive down 2dB? 😉
///Leif
Omnia 6, no –
Erwin, I have a better idea.
Rather than thinking about it in terms of processors, think about it in terms of sound. If you can record MPX from a station whose sound you like, I’m sure I can help you on what settings to use to sound like it.
Please note that it must be true MPX (FM Composite) — L/R output of a tuner is not usable for this. See http://mpxtool.com .
///Leif
Hi Dave!
Actually, the Winamp volume control isn’t supposed to work. For some reason, it works on your Vista machine, despite not being supposed to work, and that’s not good.
Allow me to explain. 😉
Breakaway, by definition, is a dynamics processor. It does its darndest to equalize the volume level between different sources. Thus, if you were to turn down the volume level in Winamp, then Breakaway would try to bring it up.. So, if you really wanted the volume down, you’d have to turn it down even further – until Breakaway would finally run out of range (when your Winamp volume is at 5% or so), but then you would also be amplifying noise. This isn’t a software issue, but rather just a logical conclusion of doing dynamics processing. Volume controls must be *after* the audio processor, not before.
To prevent this fruitless arms-race from occuring in the first place, Breakaway disables the volume control on incoming sources (when possible), and provides a convenient *global* volume control, which you can use to set the volume level you want, regardless of the level of the incoming audio (to a degree). Apart from the tray popup, you can also use the explorer toolbar — this gives you a volume control on your screen at all times.
Best,
///LeifIndeed. All ASIO4ALL does is to translate ASIO -> Kernel Streaming, since most apps do not directly support KS.
Breakaway Live, however, DOES support kernel streaming. Use that instead, unless you have a card that really supports ASIO.
With a real ASIO card you could expect latency in the 10-20ms range.
///Leif
