JesseG

I saw marketing-speak and ZERO quantifiable information/specs to back up their (audiotx) claims. Questionable.

Actually… the soundcard will need to be properly loaded, so that you’re pulling current from it, so it’ll need to be plugged into whatever you’re going to plug it in to. A scope is designed to NOT draw much current, which is caused by the resistance being so high. This is so you can measure an active circuit without disturbing it, and to protect the scope from devices capable of high current. The side effect is you can’t measure current flow through a scope, but that’s what a DMM (digital multi-meter) is for.

So you could just get a splitter (aka y-cable) and hook the scope up to one of those. Remember to take the y-cable back off after you’re done calibrating. You know what they say about weak chains.

Definitely some kind of buffer under-run being caused by something starting up along side Breakaway, probably a device driver getting going. Breakaway & the pipeline should correct for it quickly but the pipeline is unfortunately nowhere near as robust as Breakaway itself. That all changes in the new version of Breakaway which features an updated pipeline that has multi-phasic adaptive resampling built into it, courtacy of Leif. (Virtual Audio Cable benefits from this too, since it’s one in the same basically)

I guess the only thing I can think of is to try toggling the "Real Time Priority" so that it’s one or the other and see if that helps the problem go away without causing any other issues. If you don’t *need* real time priority to prevent glitching, then I personally don’t recommend using it, simply because Windows (even 7 still) doesn’t handle that as smoothly as it could in *some* cases.

How’s the i5 mobile? 🙂

Daisy chained processing has been done in the past. One of the best 80s setups I’ve ever heard was two VERY customized Aphex 2020s. It’s definitely something to be very careful to not overdo, especially peak limiting.

There are some changes coming in the pipeline for the core (which makes up almost 100% of what happens in Audio Enhancer version) which improve how this kind of thing is dealt with. It really takes some intelligent design, and very careful preset design, to minimize this problem.

The reason being… is the problem is with the source audio itself. Cause by "the loudness war". See, processors like Breakaway are working on the long term average for most of the loudness gain sometimes. So when it’s bringing stuff up, it’s often times doing a lot better job at making things loud without removing clarity and details in the recording than what was done during mixing and mastering. Sad but true these days, on an ever increasing percentage of new recordings. So then when those recordings get much louder on average, they aren’t leaving any headroom to do so, so they are having to limit and clip the peaks to fit within the maximum digital signal levels possible.

So when you end up averaging out the loudness, what you’re hearing when the song should be getting louder… is the amount of details that were removed from the recording during mixing and mastering.

Here’s one less extreme example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UjQc0dM4H4

Here’s a more extreme example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTBoMlsw-0I

actual releases. So basically what’s happening is when these recordings that are already quite loud when the band is soft then need to seem to get louder, they do on average… at the expense of detail and clarity. Breakaway, like these videos, is just making the comparison fair by comparing them at equal loudness.

And let’s face it, that’s how people listen to music. They set the volume knob to be where they want the average loudness to be at. The whole reason we all enjoy Breakaway for listening, to not have to deal with differences.

The loss in clarity and detail is very real and very frequent with new music. There will hopefully be a few things in Breakaway to help combat that problem in the future, there is definitely some great ideas that are being worked on. So be hopeful but don’t expect magic on every single pre-destroyed piece of audio you feed into Breakaway.

Finally, a good experiment, compare the differences in those two videos above, with and without Breakaway. 🙂

J

honestly… Omnia.11 gives Breakaway a run for its money. Mainly because of excellent density-aware compression and limiting. Is it a coincident that’s the #1 thing I would love to see Leif add? 😉 But I will also add that the MPX clipper is also a game changer too. Once that is available, I think it will make picking one or the other even harder.

you can get scopes off ebay for less than 50 bucks all day long. you guys have no excuse to not have 1-2 scopes around. 🙂

if you *really* wanna get nuts, spend 75-100 on a portable digital model. some of them are getting REALLY nice. 🙂

there’s a new one coming out that has me very excited about… it will initially have MSRP of *** $199 (hopefully about $50 less street price). check out the prototype:

the ADC in single channel mode goes up to 144mHz. so you can monitor the FM base-band directly on that little beast!!!! (tell me you don’t want it already) save waveforms to SD. firmware update from SD or USB. sampling into software via USB (linux has a ton of stuff for these already thanks to the "Hammys")… and it’s a very fully featured scope. it’ll also do up to 8192 point FFT-based operations. decent memory built in but with SD you can go as high as you can find.

oh… and it’s smaller than your iPhone.

[quote author=”sneradio”]LOL…well, I’m using one of the original versions. If it aint broke…[/quote]
I suppose. Although there was an update at some point there (i forget which version) which had the core update with a higher resolution (more bits) calculations happening, and the jump in quality was audible even at a glance. 🙂 Several others noticed it too, before it was mentioned.