I didn't read it as someone trying to sell anything...that's a totally unfounded claim. I read it as an honest statement.

Unfounded? They mentioned their services in the second paragraph.

Still, doesn't mean he actually doesn't believe what he's talking about. Strawman argument.

ie: he mentions their services which stands as 'proof' his outlook is biased. Nonsense.

He is trying to sell something, and linked the service in the second paragraph. I agree that he probably believes what he's talking about. I don't know what strawman you're speaking of, I responded to this:

"I didn't read it as someone trying to sell anything...that's a totally unfounded claim."

Again, not unfounded. He linked the service in the article.

I provided at an 'interesting read', which was an unbiased offering. Then, it was implied that it was nonsense because, they're in the business of 'selling analog'.

I mean, if UA Spark wrote a blog post about why plugins are better than their hardware counterparts, would you take it at face value?

I don't take things at face value. I try to remain objective. I have no idea what he really believes or not, there's no proof of what he 'really believes'...

I know everyone was dying to know....client bought the flute/bass clarinet version.
And there was much dancing and celebration throughout the lands.
8801 wins!
I can post it in a few days, once it goes live, in case anyone's not interested.

Meantime, some cursory research tells me that the entire strip in the 8801 is a direct representation of each channel in the 88r console.
As Plush says, not a 'based on', the same exact parts and circuitry.
(plus the Marinair)
Wow.
The pre and the EQ I love.
But I've never gotten the comp in the 8801 to sound good in any way - transparent, character, anything. I've tried it every which way, on the way in during performance, as a mix tool/insert, on so many insts..... Any time I have that box fired up and patched in I'm, like, "this time i'll figure out the compressor".
This must be operator error, as the console is obviously, heavily and widely revered by both gods and janitors alike.

True. Anyways, I'm always a skeptic in this space. Objective analysis is rarely the go-to in the audio world, at least at the consumer level.

You are both, in fact, correct.
Narrator has a natural bias.
Narrator comes clean with that precise bias.

But even these datas can not confirm that the writing itself is trying to sell anything. One can suspect, but not know, unless one is the writer.
And probably not even then.

I'll bet you all agree on that.

Can't stop
Yeah, yeah
Can't stop talking 'bout it, baby!
Talkin' 'bout that Neve!

Please don't. A BCM/8 or a 2254 with steam gauges, yes!

RCA connectors, pls.

I'd say don't bother holding out for a plugin. In my experience once something is recorded with a stock interface preamp it's too late. Even if you then run it through a real Neve at that point, the extra information that the Neve would have recorded is already not there. You will have an easier time with a clone. Even if you have to save up for a used Golden Age Premier it with be worth it. That was my experience anyway from before I got my own vintage one.

I said I thought it was FUD, and I do.

Not just because I know the guy is trying to sell analog, but because I read the whole thing and it read as FUD.

In the middle that Sharp11 skipped, there's a litany of scary things that can go wrong in writing a plugin.

To pick one example, there's failing to upsample enough for the HF content of intermediate waveforms, and then getting aliasing.

Yes, it hurts when you do that.

As a Doctor (of EE and CS) I have a simple prescription: don't do that, then. Figure out your algorithms correctly and do enough upsampling.

He warns that sometimes you don't just need to upsample the obvious audio waveforms, you may need to upsample the control signals as well, because the control signals can modulate the audio and generate frequencies in the resulting audio that were not in the original audio.

Well, of course they can. If you turn the volume up and down 1000 times a second, you have an
amplitude modulator. And if you vary the speed 1000 times a second, you have a frequency modulator. Either will throw off sideband signals above and below the original frequences.

Anybody who knows the first thing about audio signal processing should be well aware of that, and know about the frequency content of their control signals and how they're modulating the audio signal.

Normally, this isn't much of a problem because you can ensure that the control signals don't have any high frequency content, and the sidebands they generate are just not far from the original frequencies, and therefore not much higher. You may not need any additional oversampling, or not much. But if you do need it, do that, then.

This stuff is generally not rocket surgery. There is an entire well-developed field of computer science known as "numerical analysis" that's all about figuring out how to approximate things as near as you need to, putting bounds on the possible errors (distortions), and keeping things computationally efficient.

There are college courses and textbooks and research journals on numerical analysis and on digital signal processing, and handbooks and standardized libraries and cookbooks for a lot of this stuff.

You need to be properly educated, by taking the relevant courses, or by reading the right books and papers, if you have a solid background in CS and a decent grasp of engineering math.

If you like and understand math and CS, it's just not as scary as that article makes it out to be. It's not lions, tigers, and bears, and it's definitely not Here Be Dragons.

He presents a scary-looking equation that's actually not very complicated by the standards of mathematicians and engineers, presumably because it looks intimidating to most musicians.

And he talks about things like how capacitors aren't just capacitors and have resistance and inductance, too. Oh no! There's some thing called "equivalent series resistance" that sounds scary.

That's AC circuits 101 stuff, but you wouldn't know it the way he talks about it. It's called equivalent series resistance because it's easy to analyze by modeling it as a resistor in series with the capacitor. No big deal.

He's making basic stuff that real engineers and computer scientists do before breakfast sound like terrifying, effectively impossible stuff for mere humans to get right.

Yeah, it's FUD.

Yeah, it's biased.

I don't know if the guy believes his own bullshit, and I don't care. It's bullshit.

I read that post in awe, Doc, mouth breathing.

It doesn't mean that the compressors are though.

Besides the original 2254 & 33609, every other "Neve" inspired dynamics offering has been less then "exciting".
More utilitarian then anything.

I stopped reading the second he promoted his mixing service in the first few sentences. The difference between you and me is that you'd read past that.

I lost interest. Just like I lost interest in this forum. Because it is boring. Neve is boring. Especially the reissues and RND. You can keep your Silk knob and Chetfield Channels. And BAEs. It's boring.

Hardware sounds better than plugins though. Everyone knows that. It may not be scientifically proven, but it is written in scripture. I believe everything I read, especially if I scripted it.

Self conscious much? I was replying to am. son. Not you. You speak out of anger, force, etc. I have no interest in that....and there ARE still professional people that prefer hardware based on what they hear. Go tell them they're full of sh!t as well. I've been mixing ITB for 5 years.

Thx thrill. Are you familiar with that particular 88 compressor?
I'm really curious if I'm just awful with it, or even possibly have had a faulty unit this whole time.
I can't even describe the sound as 'utilitarian'. Like, I can't use it. Not for more than a half a db of GR at 1/1. Anything more, and it just sounds.....bad.

It's got a zillion knobs jammed in there too. I've played with all of them.
Understood that maybe Neve console comps haven't been the number one reason people love them, but if the comps in the 88 were as bad as i think this one is, it might not enjoy the reputation it has now.
Ergo, I'm doing something really clod-like. Not using it correctly. Or it's literally busted.

Dude, BAE's may be boring, but they're awesome. I've never had the real 1073 mccoy, but my early brents are all sortsa three dee sounding.

Fully ITB? No summing, no outboard anything?
Real question, I'm curious.

Yes, fully ITB with a mouse, and I don't really like it, to be honest.

The Neve dynamic offerings after the older 2254/ 33609/2264/ 33314 were designed to perform a specific function...namely clean/transparent dynamic control, which they actually do well.
But its a whole different design then the original stuff.

So if you are looking for transparent and or clean control you are probably ok, as you aren't going to hear a big chnage to the signal. To some this is considered the definition of "boring" compression.

I have a pair of Aurora Audio Stingers. Defo has a 'sound' and a unique form factor.

My LTL Silver Bullets have a nice Neve topology. I don't know if it sounds exactly like a vintage 1073, and I couldn't give a hoot - it just sounds really good.

Oh well; sorry if I misunderstood who all you were speaking to, but the issue of whether the article was biased came up, and I addressed that.

I definitely speak out of irritation.

I've studied and researched and taught computer science for decades, and it's really irritating to hear it misrepresented, especially by people who make out to be harder than it actually is, as if entire fields that my friends are experts in (like numerical analysis) didn't even exist, and there weren't places to look for the relevant expertise.

OK

I'm not saying that in 2025, plugins do everything that analog circuits do, and do it at least as well.

I am saying that that particular article should not persuade anyone either way. It is biased and misrepresents a lot of issues.

I'll go a little further, and say many articles I've read on a similar theme are similarly full of shit. There's a lot of it around.

There may be many wonderful analog audio circuits that nobody has satisfactorily emulated with software, yet, and I wouldn't know; it's not my particular field.

I do know, from learning even the basics of audio and circuits and DSP decades ago, that much of the rhetoric about why analog is (allegedly) superior to digital is nonsense. And yes, that annoys me.

I think preamps are a worthy investment if you already have the mics and the space to get good tracks, you can shoot out a few options and get whatever fits the job for the music you do, but unless you're running a commercial facility, it's a preference thing. Neve isn't inherently better than API or Daking or Chandler or AEA or whatever. It's a color.

Even then, I think part of the charm of a commercial facility in the olden days was that you had very few options for pre's, you had the console and maybe a couple of racked units but you mostly used the console and that was part of how that studio sounded in general, and I think tracking most things through one type of preamp, Neve or not, is more beneficial to the track than not. I think that certainly lents itself to more "magic" than whatever transformers a certain preamp uses.

I think the Neve myth is mostly related to how nice stuff sounded through those consoles, not whether or not your preamp has marinair transformers or whatever.

There's a very popular compressor out there which is an analogue gain element controlled by a cheap PIC microcontroller. The audio signal goes into a little envelope detector and that gets sampled by the PIC with a 12-bit ADC at a few hundred hertz and all of the attack, decay, and the nonlinear function that forms the knee, are all done in software at very very low speeds.

Part of the control loop (namely the part up front where the envelope detector is) needs to be super fast but once the detection is done, you can get away with all kinds of stuff. And yes, it can sometimes be possible to have some odd artifacts with control path aliasing, but a lot of that can be worked around.

A lot of this stuff has been worked out and programmers just learn it over and over and once people get a sense of how it works we get a new generation of kids who have to learn it all over again.
--scott

F*ckin' Gravy.
























(Neve)

Sorry, I am a fan of inline sixes. Every cat we owned could tell the difference in sound when I pulled up in the driveway vs. when anyone else pulled up. Until a friend with a Chrysler slant-six pulled up and then Mr. Cat was very confused.
--scott