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Hi Scotty!
quote :I run direct out of NexGen Digital to a VAC then BBP (or Live) so I have no control over the levels. I did use the 6db attenuator and that solved the problem when I was trying sgeirk’s suggested settings. From that result I couldn’t figure out where the DSPs are in relation to what I am seeing on the Input meter. The BBP input meter showed my levels to be accordingly lower and my guess is the AGC makes up for that attenuation, so where does the affect of the plugins bass efx and mpact/clunk (that caused the level increase that caused the overload) come into play? Prior to the Multiband?The DSPs are before the Input meter, and thus before the clip detector. The plug-ins are called as if you were building a chain of compressors in hardware, i.e. the only place to plug something in is before the input.
The Bass-EFX and Impact/Clunk presets do not increase average levels! They do not increase the energy of the audio.
However, in the case of audio that was peak limited or clipped on the CD, the energy level will be artificially high while the peak level is low, and when it goes through either of these plug-ins, some of the peak (as it was before clipping / limiting) will be restored. Those peaks will clip again if there’s no headroom, and that’s extra bad. 😉
Please note that even though some peaks are restored, any distortion which was in the original will still remain. It’s not a clip-restoration plug-in — perfect clip restoration is conceptually impossible (once information is lost it cannot be retrieved).
///Leif
Hi Giovanni!
Breakaway Audio Enhancer is for music listening, not for streaming.
For streaming, you can use Breakaway Live or Breakaway Broadcast. They both come with multiple pipelines, so that you can use Pipeline 1 from Player to Breakaway, and Pipeline 2 from Breakaway to Encoder.
Best regards,
///LeifHi Conor!
Correct — if you run without any attenuators or plug-ins, then the clip detector will be looking at exactly what comes out of the pipeline (which is exactly what went into the pipeline). Thus, no red flashing = no clipping at the input.
By the way, regarding normalizing to 95%:
95% translates to 0.45dB.
0.45dB is not a lot of headroom, Conor 😉.
Although, for normalizing a wave file I suppose it’s fine, but you might as well have normalized to 99 or 100% really — 0.45dB is barely enough to be audible.
Best,
///LeifNope, that’s not the bug. 🙂
To feed audio from Breakaway Live to Breakaway Broadcast, you should not use the DSP plug-in! BBP has the functionality built in, if you select Live as the source.
///Leif
Hi Carlos!
Attenuating the audio by 6dB would be identical to reducing the range by 6dB except that when attenuating the input, the gating threshold will sit higher in relation to the signal.
Thus, if you want more gating (whether downward expansion (noisegates) or compressor freeze-gating), you could attenuate the audio by 6 or 12dB, and turn up Range to compensate. Might possibly be a useful trick. 🙂
///Leif
Actually turning the pipeline volume control could wouldn’t help — you could still be clipping the input of the pipeline, and then simply hiding the problem by attenuating afterwards. The meters would stop flashing, but the distortion would still be there!
The very best solution is to lower the gain before any clipping.
Using a sound card with an analog input, this translates to lowering the sensitivity (i.e. raising the clip level).
Using a player on the computer, feeding a pipeline, this translates to decreasing the MP3 encoders gain! As an example, in Winamp, this can be done by enabling Fast Layer 3 EQ in the in_mp3 configuration and then turning on the EQ and adjusting the PRE-AMP slider down. Unfortunately, most players do not have this functionality, which is why clipped CDs get clipped a second time when decoding MP3s recorded from them.
As long as you make sure that there’s no clipping further in the chain, though, using the attenuator is perfectly acceptable.
Perhaps I should modify the clip detector to make it detect clipping both before and after the plug-in chain.. This way one could really be certain. Input clipping is the worst possible thing to do to an audio processor (whether done intentionally while mastering a CD, or by accident in the program chain). It adds no loudness whatsoever (any loudness increase gets undone by the processing itself), but adds plenty of grunge and distortion. The clipper at the end of an FM processor is *designed* to clip audio with a minimum of artifacts, but clipping the input (squaring off the samples) is not at all the same thing, and sounds a hundred times worse.
///Leif
Yes. Increase attenuation until the flashing stops.
Make sure you’re not overloading the actual sound card input, too.
///Leif
You should be able to run two BBP instances the same way, both using Livelink 1.
If that doesn’t work, that’s a bug — I’ll have to fix it for the next version. 🙂
///Leif
Hi Timmy!
Gating is actually one of the simpler things in Breakaway — two thresholds, when the input level drops below the first threshold, release of all compressors (including the wideband agc) slow down by a factor of 3. When the input level drops below the second threshold, release completely halts.
The gating levels are actually fixed per preset, and are not affected by the range setting.
The big gotcha is — if you’re using gating to prevent the compressors from gaining too much, why set range that high in the first place? The whole point of range is to put a limit on how much gain can be applied by the compressors. Gating is unpredictable — sudden silence on the input will freeze the compressors where they are, whereas a slow fadeout will allow the compressors to keep gaining (until they hit the range limit, and stop gaining further). On the other hand, Range is completely predictable — it will never gain more than that, period. You can even see it on the meters — the gain scale moves with the range control, and at the very point the meter disappears, that’s it — there’s no further gain available to apply.
///Leif
Actually, it doesn’t offer nothing. What it offers is hugely unpredictable peak control, and giving the compressor too much control over the spectrum to be able to sound acceptable.
The more bands you have, the more unpredictable the peak output becomes, and as such you need further limiting afterwards with fewer controls.
It’s easy to imagine. Consider that music normally covers all bands, so the thresholds of those bands must be adjusted so that the peak sum is roughly 0dB. The thresholds must be set pretty very low. Then, consider a sinewave, which sits mostly in a single band. It’s going to have *very* low peak output, since there’s only a single band active.
Besides, if they want to play the number-of-bands game, I’ve got them beat anyway. The ITU-R SM.1268-1 limiter in BBP is a 256 band limiter. Its purpose is not to control peaks, but to control the spectrum as transparently as possible. As such, it works! You can see the evidence of this clearly by looking at the MPX output of BBP with a spectrum analyzer, with the ITU limiter on versus off. You’ll see that with the ITU limiter active, the stereo subcarrier has a very flat top — almost like the textbook examples of the FM stereo system (drawing the subcarrier as a block).
///Leif
The first 2 bands are for bass processing (unlike most processors where only 1 band is for bass). This way, Breakaway keeps thick bass lines safely separate from voices, avoiding spectral gain intermodulation. Adding a third would not really serve any purpose — bass is played one note at a time. There is no such thing as a bass chord — the spectrum analyzer in our brains cannot coherently resolve more than one bass note played at the same time. Thus, adding one more band would only cause disadvantages, like bringing up rumble while pushing down the actual bass notes.
I believe 6 bands is the sweet spot for audio processing. 7 bands has some advantages but also some serious disadvantages.
///Leif
It seems the high-end in the Twente preset is a bit overdone. I think I might tame it down a bit for the next version, maybe?
///Leif
Hi Camclone!
The Breakaway Core supports 4, 5, 6 and 7 bands. I started making Reference Settings for 7 bands, but found a song where it faltered (too strong band separation made it sound strange), so I switched to 6 bands at that point, which is why most settings are 6 bands. 7 is workable for some formats, but already on the edge — 8 would be too much.
Clean, clear and louder than ever? Congratulations, you’ve done the impossible! Good for you.
///Leif
Hi Timmy,
Thank you for your comments! 🙂
Indeed, setting range at 100% is asking it to boost quiet parts too much 🙂. Try leaving range at 50, and perhaps turn power down instead of up.
Personally, if listening by myself, I run Reference Settings with big speaker systems and Reference Heavy with smaller speaker systems. I tend to leave the controls all at 50, although I may boost bass for taste. 🙂
Best,
///Leif
