Quote:
Originally Posted by
tedannemann
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This amount of aliasing insane. Drive is at 0 dB. As said this doesn't happen with other current (analog modelled) EQs - and most important not with the Siemens original unit. There is no need to talk this down. For $129 in 2016 this is just disappointing. The big aliasing debates are old too. Oversampling (possibilities) should be standard nowadays.
And you are right it's unfair to compare Lindell TE-100 to the Soundtoys SIE-Q. Lindell (actually LSR Audio) is a one man show (French programmer) who is pretty new to the game. Soundtoys is an established company that is doing its thing for decades.
On the other side, I love the curves and the overall sound. But once you got "aliasing" in your ear - there is no way to use plugins like that in 44.1k anymore at least not for high frequency content.
And it doesn't matter who uses what. There is a big load aliasing in it which shouldn't be there or at least the user should have the option for plugin internal oversampling.
I’m just catching up on this thread, and I’d like to dispel a few misconceptions:
1. Soundtoys doesn’t “care” about aliasing. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are acutely aware of the impact, the techniques, and difficulty of aliasing reduction in non-linear digital audio processing, and analog emulation in particular, in fact we were probably one of the earliest plug-in companies to release products that addressed this in any way at all. If we didn’t care about sound quality (or didn't invent tricks to reduce the artifacts of digital saturation modeling), you wouldn’t be hearing our plug-ins on almost every high-level professional mix, and the response to the sound of Sie-Q has been almost unanimously glowing.
2. The posted comparison between Sie-Q and the other plug-ins has a serious flaw, in that even though the comparisons were made at “default”, 0 dB settings, the THD levels between Sie-Q and the other plug-ins are vastly different. Part of our aesthetic is to add a healthy dose of vibe (harmonics, etc.). In our own testing, it was very difficult to even get the other plug-ins to produce the same level of saturation. When we did, the results were very different, and in some cases, running comparable distortion levels through some of the “other” processes produced very ugly results indeed. We’re not intending to critique any of our colleagues, and those plug-ins are quite excellent, but would encourage anyone doing comparative testing to at least compare apples to apples. If you don’t want that much saturation, you can turn down the drive control, or allow more headroom (always a good idea).
3. Though we do listen to test sweeps (as painful, and unrealistic as that is), our preference is to listen to REAL signals, which in most cases have a strong bias towards lower frequencies. And yes, we know that there are exceptions, but for the vast majority of musical sounds, we feel like we have made good tradeoffs. And EVERY plug-in has to make some tradeoffs between frequency response, accuracy of modeling, CPU consumption, operating levels, and artifacts such as aliasing. In the case of Sie-Q, we opted for reasonable CPU consumption, VERY accurate frequency response compared to the hardware , and a full range of harmonics which is important in adding the needed grit for a nonlinear discrete solid-state emulation. I have seen other plug-ins reduce the number of harmonics produced, which is a fine strategy, but isn't particularly accurate for lower frequency sounds, or roll off the high-end earlier, producing a less accurate frequency response.
Anyway, I realize not everyone’s going to love our choices. But we’re grateful for the many, many people that do, and for the honest feedback.
Ken
