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Oh trust me, I’m working on it 🙂. Custom sound cards are not an easy thing, but if it all works out, it will be awesome once it’s done 😉.
It won’t be called Breakaway, and will not have the Breakaway user interface. It will have the Breakaway multiband core though, of course composite clipping, of course full control and everything else you can think of. We’ll probably use a quad core CPU to leave every option open for the future.
///Leif
DjSmooth, the Protection Limit preset is mostly pure limiter, but it does bring in agc and compression if the input level is so high that limiting would be excessive.
Regarding noise, I haven’t noticed this myself — is it boosting noise from your sound card input, or truly generating noise itself? Please try with a Breakaway Pipeline as a source (but use the same output sound card) and let me know if there’s an improvement.
///Leif
[quote author=”maczrool”][quote author=”Leif”]Yeah, Stavros, what would you say is the competitive advantage of releasing the MPX clipper as software, allowing it to be cracked? ///Leif[/quote]
If you don’t think hardware can be cracked you’re living in fantasy land 😉
It may be harder, but if someone wants to gain access to your code and reverse engineer it or whatever you’re concerned about it can still be done. I guess I never thought of security as one of the benefits of hardware over the software approach.[/quote]
Depends on how you define cracking. Crackers are good at removing locks and copy protection. What if you remove the locks and copy protection and then find out the code doesn’t run on off-the-shelf hardware, for example only supports a custom sound card, which does not even appear to the system as a sound card? It could even be plugged in through ethernet.
All of a sudden, it’s not a matter of cracking — you’d have to familiarize yourself with the code enough to interface it with completely different hardware. Yes, it can be done (anything can!), but it’s an order of magnitude more difficult, and at that point it’s not cracking anymore — it’s software engineering.
But yes, hardware can be cracked. Tiessecci "cracked" the 8200 v1 (before Orban learned to pour epoxy on their rom chips), siphoned the DSP code, and released their Digimod 8300 which looks a lot like, and sounds exactly like an 8200. They also added a 6th multiband meter to the screen, coupled to band 5 with some extra gain reduction, to make it a 6-band compressor. Very creative, boys! That sounds much better than the 5-band 🙂
///Leif
[quote author=”celar”]WOW- fantastic, I never knew you had to move the mic around while calibrating.[/quote]
There are those who disagree with me on this. My take is that if you calibrate with a stationary mic, you calibrate for ONE ear in exactly that position, and if you move two inches you need to recalibrate, because it won’t be valid. 🙂[quote author=”celar”]
One question about your instructions: I always assumed one should use white noise to calibrate, since white noise frequencies are of equal power. Can you elaborate on the use of pink noise for this purpose?[/quote]Certainly!
White noise is equal power PER FREQUENCY.
Pink noise is equal power PER OCTAVE.
To go up an octave, you double the frequency. Thus, each higher octave contains twice as many frequencies as the previous one.
So, White Noise measures flat on a spectrum analyzer.
Pink noise measures flat on an RTA.
White noise measures top-heavy on an RTA. Power rises 3dB per octave.
Pink noise measures bottom-heavy on a spectrum analyzer.
As you can see, a spectrum analyzer IS NOT an RTA, and vice versa.
There’s also brown noise. It measures bottom heavy, power falls 3dB per octave:
To me personally, white noise sounds like the rain, pink noise sounds like the ocean, and brown noise sounds like the niagara falls. 🙂
Best,
///LeifHi Kreso!
I will make a demonstration video within a couple of weeks, along with screen shots, showing how to do it.
If you don’t want to wait that long, here’s how I do it:
Let’s assume you have 2 different computers — the Breakaway Live computer, and the RTA computer. (It can be the same, but you have to work out the sound card routing yourself, perhaps different sound cards.)
Set Breakaway RTA to capture audio from the Microphone.
Hold the microphone in your hand! Don’t use a stand. You will need to move it around constantly to avoid being fooled by room reflections.
In Breakaway Live, turn on Pink Noise, for just one speaker. Unless the speakers are very close together, you will need to RTA each speaker separately, one at a time!
Set RTA to 100 averages, 1/6 octave. You will need to decide on a "baseline" to aim for, where you will get flat frequency response using just a couple of eq boosts (+ gain), but mostly eq cuts (- gain). It’s generally better to cut than to boost, to avoid eating up the available headroom.
Start by identifying the tallest peaks. You want to do the job using as few bands of EQ as you can! Apply bands of EQ one at a time, flattening the curve as you go. To make sure you line the EQ up with the peak you see on the RTA, don’t be afraid to set Gain to +18.0 dB, so that you see the peak shoot way way up. After that, turn the gain down and adjust until it flattens out. Wide bandwidth EQs sound better than Narrow bandwidth EQs (cleaner impulse response), so use as wide as you can to do the job.
When you have one speaker as flat as you can, do the same with the other speaker. It will take practice — you will probably have to start over a few times until you get the hang of it.
When you’re all done, and have the response as flat as you can, the result should sound like a pair of new speakers — they should sound really open and transparent, without annoying resonances, but they will also lack bass and sound thin. That’s when you go into the Loudness Settings and apply EQ for taste, like bass boost. You can also make these boosts volume dependent, so that you boost bass only at lower volumes, etc. Remember, we’re not actually trying to make the frequency response completely flat — we’re trying to get rid of resonances flatten the response to get rid of tinniness, coloration, and make the speakers sound natural and transparent. Once you’ve achieved that goal, it’s perfectly fine to boost bass and treble to taste!
When it’s all done, pressing the Bypass Speaker EQ button should be like night-and-day.
I will have much better instructions in the future. I just typed this up impromptu. If anyone has comments / suggestions / corrections / additions, feel free! That’s why it’s a forum 😉.
///Leif
Hi Decibel,
Thank you kindly. 🙂
It is possible to use a standard composite clipper after BBP ASIO, but in my opinion it’s not worth it, because:
BBP (and BBP ASIO) work very hard to keep distortion out. On certain sounds, like Telephone and Xylophone, any tiny little bit of distortion is audible. So, if you add a standard composite clipper, if you add even 0.5dB of loudness, all these difficult sounds will get distorted, where they were previously 100% clean! Is it really worth that for 0.5 dB? I don’t think it is. You also don’t actually gain 0.5dB, you only gain at the very most 0.24dB. See Greg Ogonowski’s paper here.
You can break that rule by making a non-standard composite clipper, like I’ve done but not while maintaining realtime latency. We’re talking 100+ milliseconds. At that point, you’re already long past realtime monitoring, so you might as well go completely phase linear, with a total latency of 500ms. Then, we can gain almost 3dB, and STILL keep the audio clean.
I will not release this as software, it will have to be a hardware unit of some kind. When it’s released, you’ll be the first to know 🙂.
///Leif
Hi Buik!
My apologies. I responded to this post the same day you posted it, and somehow the response got lost! It’s not the first time this has happened to me. Not sure what’s going on — could be a bug in phpbb.
(Or, perhaps I’m getting senile 😉 )Right now, and until the end of July, we are giving BBP ASIO for free to owners of BBP + Live. Thus, all you need to do is to buy Breakaway Live, and you will get BBP ASIO and Live.
You can also use the $30 off coupon we have for BBP customers buying Breakaway Live!
Who said we don’t take care of our customers 😉.
I will PM you the coupon.
///Leif
Hi Teresa!
Yes – this is exactly what Breakaway does best! Anything you play on your computer will come out at an even level, whether it’s streamed or downloaded, without annoyingly loud surprises.
Best,
///LeifHi! Thank you for your comments.
How odd — my experience is the exact opposite of yours! I suspect perhaps something is not calibrated correctly.
I would really like to know, how did you do your A/B comparison? What processors did you compare to? Perhaps you can record MPX (either off air or directly out of the processors), so that we can hear the comparison you made. Perhaps then we can identify what exactly it is you don’t like, in technical terms.
///Leif
Yeah, Stavros, what would you say is the competitive advantage of releasing the MPX clipper as software, allowing it to be cracked? Compared to, say, saving it for a hardware unit? 🙂
I do think 10 bands is too much — 7 is already too much for certain program material!
I think there is a misconception that more bands is better. You split things up into bands to prevent intermodulation and improve consistency. However, at 7 bands, there’s virtually no intermodulation, and you start getting unnatural colouring in certain program material.
Look, if you really think more is better, you need to look at the Vorsis AP2000. It has a 31-band compressor/limiter, the phase tornado plug-in (only they forgot the off-button) and it has an MPX clipper too 😀.
In fact, you can hear what it sounds like at mpxtool.com — recordings from the Dutch soundprocessing freakdag.
Thank you for your comments. BBP 0.90.7x does sound good, doesn’t it 😉.
By the way, my MPX clipper is even higher latency than the L/R clipper in BBP Standard, and there is no way around it. I tried making a low latency one, but did not even come close. Here, let me explain in different terms:
LOW LATENCY
CLEAN AUDIO
GOOD PEAK CTRLAs a designer, you get to pick any TWO. If you want all three, you have to compromise — you can’t have 100% of all three 😉
Also, this just means it’s technically possible — it doesn’t mean that it easy. A standard hard clipper (what you get from overload) is 100% low latency, 0% clean audio, 0% good peak control (because you get overshoots when you low-pass-filter the signal later).
FM processors are generally Low Latency and Good Peak Control, but lack in the Clean Audio department. Adding latency does not clean up the audio. Latency is a side-effect of the other things you have to do to clean it up.In BBP ASIO, I invented some new things that enabled me to stretch the curve and reach a compromise, for the L/R clipper. Make no mistake, I’m compromising on all three points, but I was able to get all three good enough. Total clipper latency is 12ms, which together with the sound card i/o and the multiband processing adds up to 17ms — just fast enough for realtime. However, it’s right at the limit! 5 more milliseconds and it’s too slow. The audio is clean enough — xylophones are still clean, telephones are still clean, voices are still clean. Peak control is good enough — within 1 percent or two.
However, MPX clipping is a much harder problem to begin with, and at this same latency (12ms clipper latency) I had totally ruined, distorted audio (like normal composite clippers!) OR lots of peak overshoots remaining.
Please note that normal composite clippers aren’t driven very hard. People use composite clippers after their L/R clippers, and only drive them 0.5 – 1.0dB or so. This does not really yield any benefit (it just adds more grunge), and I think you know me by now — If it has no chance of ending up on my tombstone, I’ll pass.
///Leif
Ah! So THAT’S how I managed to miss it when typing up the list 🙂. It was actually missing from the program.
I remember now, I actually removed it to make room for one of the new, much better presets (could have been Quintessence or Point Blank). It was always a weak preset, in my humble opinion. Anyway, with this vote, everyone gets a say in the preset lineup in the next version. Basically, the list is long enough, and not all presets are excellent, so as better presets come along, the weakest ones need to go. We just need to agree on which ones are the weak ones. So, make sure you vote for your favourites 😉.
///Leif
