Presets help

Try "Reference Classical" first, then adjust the "Power" anywhere from "50" down to "0" to see if it suits your needs.

[quote author=”Baseline”]
Well, I can only hope they will make a preset that doesn’t affect the volume that much.[/quote]

The only problem is that is specifically what the software is designed to do, keep the volume at a consistent listening level. It’s great for any noisy or loud environments. It sounds like what you are looking for is no audio processing at all, meaning you don’t need audio processing software.

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

My new preset called "Passive Aggressor", combined with a new thing that will be introduced at a processing "drag race" from Netherlands called Freakdag (Freakday)… is nothing short of astonishing. So completely wide open dynamics, audio that is always very detailed, and always at the perfect loudness and spectral balance.

If I had to put a number on how dynamic it is, somewhere between actual signal and subjective dynamics, I would guess that it’s about 5dB more dynamic than the Reference preset (almost twice as much at times). But with consistency that is unmatched by any other preset I’ve tried. It’s hard to explain but the consistency you do get with a preset/sound that’s very hard loud processing is only tricking the ears in some ways into thinking that it is consistent. The difference in listenability is not even worth comparing, a wide open yet consistent sound is unchallenged. The problem is that it’s very difficult to do, and until Breakaway a processor hasn’t had a few key features to make it possible without having big problems with certain audio events.

The Omnia.11 AGC i have not heard yet, but I’ve heard it’s very good. Perhaps equally as "uncanny" as Breakaway’s or even better, I dunno. I would love to get a unit for a few months and do some presets with it.