next step…. 10 band comp/limit and ..MPX clipper…:)

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 CTRL

As 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

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

[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=”camclone”] "Breakaway hardware proccesor " with edited windows xp.. wow! i am dreaming of that![/quote]

I already do that but not with breakaway. 🙂
i try it but some things i don’t like in breakaway sound. I can’t explain.. maybe other day.

For your start try Windows called "Stripped to the bone" and put it on some c2d e.g. E5200.