Very cool investigation of what makes guitar amps sound like they do:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcBEOcPtlYkSpoiler below:
Speakers, gainstaging (internal), and eq curves are most of it.
Apparently this guy has a series of videos on the topic of where guitar tone comes from.
Cant access the link
Trying to prevent the google from tracking. I guess that piped instance was down. The youtube link is copy’able now. Anytime you see a piped or yewtube link, the only thing changed from the youtube url is the domain. So piped.kavin.rocks portion could be changed to youtube.com if necessary.
You can make a link with a description so it would still be clickable:
[\<YOUTUBE LINK> Tested: Where does the tone come from...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcBEOcPtlYk)
… becomes…
A clickable link is going to send a referrer.
Yeah, at least there’s not a thumbnail that sends one whether or not a user consents to it. A link gives a choice to copy or click.
His cab video was pretty interesting too.
He’s done interesting investigations there. It doesn’t seem like there’s much in audiophilia that isn’t wrapped in at least a thin layer of bollocks.
It’s multidimensional really. There is tons of snake oil in audio land for sure, analog and digital, tube and solid state. There are also truths that get painted up as snake oil. And truths that get painted up as heresy. Everyone has something to sell and defend of this or that tech and format. And there are some people who are genuinely super picky, others who don’t much give a shit, and everyone inbetween. I guess the snake oil and polarization is to be expected.
I always love seeing someone go after digging for truth in this stuff though, because there is so much monkey say, monkey repeat, going on without backing a bit of it up with audio demonstration. And even if this guy isn’t getting into how a bunch of small differences stack up together as a whole, he is at least starting a good conversation on how much some specific aspect matters or doesn’t.
I remember when White Sea Studios posted a video a few years back about audio aliasing in analog emulation plugins. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4taroKS_N6Q
It seemed to be that plugin developers and fanbois didn’t like what he was saying, although aliasing is one of the elephants in the room for audio dsp. I hit him up via email to encourage continuing what he was doing, and he said that he was really considering stopping because he was catching so much shit for it. He did end up easing up on it. Too bad.
You can do whatever internal processing you want. So long as it translates to a good sound in the audible range, it doesn’t matter what happened before that.
A good CD of whatever went on to make that sound will still sound good.
Actually, great. If the source material sounds great.
Real guitar amps sound great when recorded at 44.1k 16 bit CD standard audio.
I don’t disagree that 16-bit 44.1k sounds fine. It’s everything that came before that matters a shit ton more (effectively processing), including being recorded to some other format first. I’m a fan of vinyl rips and think that they should be a mainstream format sold in download/streaming stores. The cumulative processing that happens during the vinyl production process can sound very pleasant to the ears, unmatched by anything else available.
Caveat. Depending on what dsp you apply, 16-bit 44.1k recordings can be a problem. But just a straight up recording? No problem.